By Henry Uche
The Lions Club Nigeria, District 404B2, has charged parents, guardians and caregivers to monitor their wards’ exposure to the Internet and modern gadgets, as these affect their careers and destinies positively or otherwise.
As part of its contributions to improve the quality of learning, the club recently organised a reading event and spelling bee for five secondary schools in Lagos, Brilliant Child, Bola Olat College, Wuraville Secondary School, Westernville School, and Stock Bridge College, to spur students to write, spell and pronounce words correctly.
The district governor, Ademola Adesoye, implored school operators to make teaching and learning of indigenous languages and history compulsory for students, saying, without them, the education of a child was incomplete.
“Students must be monitored both at home and in schools, the use of modern phones and other gadgets can be devastating because a lot is involved in the Internet.
“We need to support teaching and learning indigenous languages and history. The relevance of both are not only glaring but rewarding,” he said.
Meanwhile, the proprietress of Wuraville School, Sidikat Balogun, warned students to desist from irrelevant TV programmes and embrace their books widely, the dictionary inclusive, for new words and meanings.
“The future is known to us by looking at what parents, teachers and students do today. So, tomorrow is a function of today. The government at all levels needs to improve the quality of education. Students must be taught the difference between reading and studying,” she said.
On her part, the co-chairperson of the committee, Olori Marie Owoniyi, who decried waning reading culture among students, said the level of decadence in communication between children and other members of the public was becoming unbecoming.
“Reading culture is dying abysmally. Students don’t read again, they even write in abbreviations, they have lost touch of communicating appropriately. They are too lazy to read wide, but they forgot that studying is one of the most difficult tasks in life. So, with this kind of reading and spelling competition, we aim to curb these fallouts and anomalies to bring them back to track,” she said.