What’s really going on? Has the standard of education fallen, crashed to ground zero? Has the labour of our heroes past in education come to zilch? I was persuaded to think in the contrary until an inward wrench riveted my attention to the dashboard. The latest Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results released by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) got me stroking my eyelid. JAMB has fixed 160 as the cut off mark for admission into Nigerian universities in the 2020/2021 session.
Note, it is 160 out of a possible 400 marks. That’s 40 percent. That’s what is required to fetch a candidate admission into a Nigerian university. Worrisome! That’s not the end of the woe. Professor Ishaq Oloyede, JAMB registrar, during a presentation of the policy considerations at the 2020 Policy Meeting on Admissions to Tertiary Institutions on Tuesday in Abuja further nailed the coffin on education. He said that 120 (30%) and above has been approved as cut off mark into Polytechnics and 100 (25%) and above for both Colleges of Education and Innovation Enterprise Institutions.
This is a scourge, a pandemic of educational stasis. And it has been so in the last decade. Let’s look at the stats. In 2017/2018 education calendar, cut off mark dipped to a horrendous 120 marks. Between 2009/2010 and 2016/2017, it steadied at 180 marks from 170 marks the previous session.
Simply put, anybody who failed the UTME exam is eligible for admission. This is both depressing and disheartening. In those days, it was not so. The UTME was highly competitive. Any candidate with a score of 200 or less should not even bother. You’ve failed. No university would welcome you. Not anymore. The university can now admit nitwits and dimwits; academic flotsams and jetsam. And we consider this normal?
Whichever way we look at it, failure is failure. The Nigerian tertiary institutions had been admitting failures and mass graduating failures. But my biggest worry is this noxious notion that only those who are not good enough should be admitted into colleges of education. I can understand admitting those with a score of 100 and above into Innovation Enterprise institutions. In reality, you don’t need long, impressive certificates or high scores to be an innovator. Some innovators never went to formal schools. Some are dropouts, men and women who just could not continue with the routine of cognitive learning. It’s a long list.
The world is replete with stories about men and women who dropped out of school at various levels; some did not even attend any school including elementary scholarship, yet they became pathfinders and defined their own space in entrepreneurship, creativity, philosophy and science. Such outliers are to be found in entertainment, marketing, cosmetology, fashion, aviation, ICT, media etcetera where they have etched their names in bold prints.
You do not need a degree, albeit a university degree, to climb the ladder of success. Bill Gates and his co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, did not bother to complete their university education. They both dropped out as sophomores (200 level students), Allen from Washington State University and Gates from Harvard. Yet, they founded the biggest software company in the world and gave both mind and soul to the computer.
She barely managed to pass her GCSE, even with a D-grade, but Kate Ross rose to stardom becoming one of the greatest models that ever catwalked the earth. Bring on the Nigerian contingent of school dropouts who breasted the tape in the nation’s race for entrepreneurial excellence. Orji Uzor Kalu; rusticated from college for participating in student protest, he forayed into business and later politics and made a success of both; Cosmas Maduka, who dropped out at elementary three to become an apprentice trader. Today, the apprentice has become the master and a very strong brand in the nation’s automobile sector. What about Cletus Ibeto who ventured into business after primary education. He now plays big in petrochemical, hospitality and automobile spare parts manufacturing, a feat many PhD holders would never dare.
Does anybody remember Henry Ford, the man who built Ford Motors? He is the automobile billionaire who never saw the four walls of a school. What about super writer and author of several books, including the evergreen Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens? He left school at age 12 and never had any other formal education but he became a journalist and great bard of classical books. And how we love the fragrance of the Coco Chanel perfumes and adore her timeless genre of clothing. But Chanel, born Gabriele Bonheur in France, never went to formal school at any level.
And would you believe that Mack Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook was a Harvard dropout? Or that Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors (of course he gave you the electric bulb) was once considered unfit for education by his teacher and had only three months of education in all his life? What about the demised Steve Jobs who gave the world an Apple and an ‘i’. The man behind the iRevolution – iMac, iPad, iPod, iPhone and other ‘Is’ only spent a semester at Reed College in Oregon, United States before dropping out.
Yes, I know all this. Entrepreneurship and innovation do not draw their strength from university certificates. They are burnished in the foundry of creative thinking and an inner strength to turn a mound of mess to petals of gold. But what about admitting persons who scored an abysmal 25 percent in an exam into our colleges of education. They are the ones who will graduate as teachers tomorrow. They are to teach our children; they are to prepare the next generation for leadership. And because they were admitted as failures, there’s a likelihood they will graduate as failures too. Yet, these are the persons we’re leaving the nation’s overall wellbeing in their hands. I fear. If we keep admitting academic dregs into our colleges of education as a routine, we would have effectively prepared the ground for the total collapse of our education. It would mean that tomorrow, only those who could not fit into other professions on account of their intellectual diminution would be handed over the responsibility of teaching our children. It’s scary because it will only lead to the creation of dynasties of blockheads. Only deep can call deep. The best a blockhead can give is to produce a colony of his kind…an assembly of blockheads.
This is not to put teachers down. But we must make teaching so attractive such that A-graders in the entrance exam should be attracted to the profession that influences all other professions. For goodness’ sake, let’s make the teacher someone who can, not someone who can’t.