From: Clement Adeyi, Osogbo
The rising spate of the fallen standard of education at all levels in the country has been blamed on misuse of social media and decline in culture and moral values among school children.
Two dons who made the attributions, on Wednesday, in Iwo, Osun State, lamented that pupils and students at primary, post-primary and tertiary levels had relegated cultural and moral values to the background and addicted themselves to negative aspects of civilisation and technology at the expense of hunger and thirst for quality education.
Prof. of Sociology, University of Lagos, Lai Olurode and Professor of Political Science of the University of Ibadan, Lanre Adewale, who made the observations during prizes and award winning day organised by wings schools, Iwo, warned that the era of social media and the advancing technology, portended huge dangers to the present generation of the youth, especially the school age populace if the wrong use was not urgently checkmated.
Prof. Adewale expressed disgust that most students were fond of exploiting the benefits of social media and technology in negative perspectives to the detriment of their education.
“There are several good aspects of social media that enhance education standard, but our children focus on the negative areas that affect their education negatively as well as their moral values,” he said.
He lamented that majority of them use their social media tools, particularly phones, ipads, laptops among others for promiscuous purposes due to the sharp drop in their cultural and moral values at the family levels.
He called on parents to check their children’s preoccupations on the social media and enforce decency and improved quality education among them.
“No society can progress or attain developments once the family which is the foundation suffers from lack of moral values,” he said.
“We need to go back to the family because no matter how beautiful a family is, without a solid foundation, that structure can not stand a test of time,” he added.
“Once the family gets it right, the immediate neighbourhood would get it right. Local government, state government and the entire country would also get it right. But once we get it wrong from the family, the society too would get it wrong.”
Prof. Olurode who is also the proprietor of Wings Schools, lamented that several failures that students recorded in examinations, especially in national examinations, were due to lack of concentration on their studies and too much attention to the the social media.
While calling on students to maximise the potentialities of the social media positively and improve on the standard of education, Prof. Olurode expressed Wings Schools’ commitment to quality education.
It was against this background that the school authority gave prizes and awards to scores of the best performers in the just-concluded terminal examination cutting across different classes.
An educationist, Mrs. Ganiyat Olurode, also stressed that families had prominent roles to play in the growth and development of the society.
She urged the students to imbibe the spirit of moral values, describing them as the agent of positive change in the society.