The teaching profession, like military service, priesthood, the bureaucracy or any such others, is a noble public service vocation which establishes the foundation of human capital development around which the development paradigm of a nation can be anchored. My entire professional credentials have been staked around the argument that if the public service fails in Nigeria, then there might be no longer any hope. The same argument, without any contradiction, can be made on behalf of the teaching profession. Both the public service and the teaching profession in Nigeria are tied together into a governance framework that feeds the ideology of how a state wants to fashion its development. In other words, both professions work in tandem to sustain a grand design that ought to lift a nation into good governance and sustainable development. While the public service calibrates the education policy that defines the developmental learning processes, the teachers are thereby drawn into rigorous educational and practical contexts which conditions their relationship to human capital development. 

It is therefore easy to calibrate the reform of the public service specifically with that of teacher education in Nigeria. Teachers, and teacher education, in this sense, must be the focus of a deep reform that is intended to achieve a capacity development that will pace them in between the students and the nation’s development ideology. And this implies, first, understanding the point of dysfunction. Several things are wrong with teachers and teacher education in Nigeria. At the most general but fundamental level, teacher education partakes of the lack of ideological basis for defining the role of education in Nigeria’s national development. It is true that the Nigerian state has a national policy on education, a document which attempts to structure the relationship that education has to national development in Nigeria. But there is a very wide gap between what the document states, and the reality of the education sector, from the primary to the tertiary level. This therefore made it possible for the education sector in general, and teacher education in particular to be caught in a double bind. One, it is caught in a political environment that promotes a haphazard policy that fails to recognize the deep-seated issues that could enable teacher education serve as the fulcrum for human capital development. And two, teacher education and its curriculum are not tied to any national development ideology that could serve as a touchstone for a nation-wide orientation on the roles of teachers.

And so, this top-level definition of the dysfunction makes all other problems understandable: the absence of a functional professionalization framework, inadequate welfare and incentivization programme, poor funding, the quality and quantity issue, lack of commitment, unbridled unethical behavior due to an ungrounded teaching ethos, and so many more. Like we mentioned in the earlier article celebrating my former classmates and boyhood friend, Bolaji Abiodun, LSF Keke, teacher education has equally been summed under the national reduction of the essence of education to the paper certificate. And this is all the more unfortunate because the colleges of education and even the universities awarding the said certificates are not up to size in terms of global certification standards or the ideological contents that imbue the certificate with development worth.   

The attempts to reform teacher education in Nigeria goes far back to the colonial period and the general efforts at sustaining a manpower momentum that Nigeria would require after the end of colonialism. The first original efforts at teacher training were handled by church missionaries, especially the Church Missionary Society (CMS) which established the first teacher training college in 1859 at Abeokuta. Other training colleges, like the St. Andrew College, Oyo (which later became the Grade II Teacher’s College), established in 1896. This pre-colonial teacher training framework, and its apprenticeship pupil-teacher system, came under the first reform scrutiny—the Phelp-Stokes Commission of 1925. A major focus of the commission report was the ill-conceived curriculum which could not properly backstop the training of Nigerian teachers. The commission recommended a more standardized approach founded on formal programmes at two teacher training institutions—the Elementary Training College and the Higher Elementary Training College.

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As national independence got closer, the realization of the manpower requirements of the soon-to-emerge Nigerian state gave rise to another urgent reform of teacher training education. This is the context for the popular Ashby Commission established in April 1959. This commission could be taken as a crucial dimension of the Nigerianisation Policy that was meant to replace expatriate officials with Nigerians. The Ashby Commission’s brief captured higher education as a critical source of manpower development for a newly independent state. Its objective was two-fold: first, to upgrade the educational requirements of Nigerians already employed; and, second, to achieve the design of a post-secondary teacher training education that will be adequate to meet Nigeria’s human capital requirements up to the 1980s. The Ashby Report, submitted in September 1960, recommended the establishment of four universities (to complement the University of Ibadan, already established since 1948): University of Nigeria, Nsukka (1960), Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (1962), University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, (1962), and the University of Lagos, Lagos (1962). However, and beyond this, the establishment of the universities was to serve as a further boost to the qualification of teachers trained at the grade II teachers training colleges. This led to the emergence of the bachelor’s degrees in education that will transform teachers from “well-qualified non-graduates” to “well-qualified graduates”.

Essentially, the post-independence development realities, especially Nigeria’s galloping population, have outstrips the number of teachers available to carry the burden of human capital development. But this is to be expected. What is not, and what has arrested Nigeria’s post-independence capacity to put in place a well-structured infrastructure for dealing with the increasing demands for teachers consists basically in aligning teacher education and its curriculum to the dynamics of national education in Nigeria. This has nothing to do with the increase in school enrolment for Nigerian students or even the proliferation of educational facilities and institutes, especially after 1977. It, however, has everything to do with the inadequacy of a comprehensive plans of action that translate educational policies into educational programmes and practicums that situate the teachers firmly in the development project in Nigeria. This urgent need for a plan of action raises the question of how the teacher education curriculum intersects the professionalization programme that maximizes the teacher’s competences and skills that could be deployed to professionally preparing the Nigerian students for the task of national development.

To be continued