A Professor of Instructional Design, Prof Reginald Okechukwu Amadi, has sued for a School-To-Industry based curriculum packed with technical skills as a functional approach to achieving a vibrant education system in Nigeria.
Amadi said the acquisition of appropriate skills by Nigerian students and graduates was hardly attainable with a curriculum that failed to emphasise a hands on desk approach to learning.
Speaking to journalists shortly after his Inaugural Lecture titled’ Social Pathology And The Challenges Of Pedagogy: The Digital Option’, at the Ignatius Ajuru University of Education (IAUE), Rumuolumeni, Port Harcourt, recently, Amadi noted with dismay the emphasis placed on certificates rather than on knowledge and skills in the education system, maintaining that it is with the school- to-industry curriculum that the system can churn out graduates and indeed, the future hope of the nation wherein they would harness their potentials to develop the nation.
Amadi regretted that the nation’s value system particularly of the education has been eroded with examination malpractice, fraud and other social vices that have impeded the growth of the system and stressed the need for a change.
Earlier in his lecture, Amadi said” I see gloom and doom with the rising state of unemployment for young graduates. The nation appears to have gone extremely lethargic or for the right choice of word ‘ comatose’. This is the second reason I chose the word ‘ Pathological’ as part of the title of this Inaugural Lecture. Can these dysfunctionalities continuously abound? Again, I cannot answer in the affirmative. I therefore advocate a change”.
“This time not a political party change but a progressive change that will usher in a functional education that will make the society a better place to live. A functional approach that will advocate a school-to-industry based curriculum loaded with technical skills’, he said.
Describing functional education as a catalyst for change, the education professor explained that it eliminates poverty, creates relevance, accessibility, empowerment and self-reliance. 
Amadi averred that recipients of functional education acquire practical skills with which they are able to harness their potentials, adding that roots are based on the learner’s needs and interest as mechanisms for activating him towards his desirable activities.
“ A functional education will in turn serve as a bastion of hope for recreating an ideal society and this must begin with a definition of the role of the school”, he stated.

By: Lady Godknows Ogbulu