Opinion: Amakeze Michael Chigozie - LET THERE BE LIGHT. AND THERE WAS DARKNESS

September 9, 2014.

LET THERE BE LIGHT. AND THERE WAS DARKNESS

If you want to recite the alphabet, you start with ABC. If you want to sing, you start with do re mi. Now let’s go back to the beginning.

How did we start recording mass failure in WAEC? How did this thickening fog that is casting benighting crass patina of ignorance across the land start?

When the colonialists landed on our shores, they had two major challenges- language barrier and shortage of manpower. So they set up schools that was essentialist by orientation. They formulated education policies that viewed education as a central body of essential knowledge that must be transmitted to all who came to school.

The colonial education was aimed at creating a small class of skilled technical and administrative functionaries. The emphasis was on reading, writing, arithmetic and religion. The new education prepared the recipient for job opportunities as teachers, church evangelists, clerks and interpreters so that they can occupy posts of responsibility which were at the time filed by Europeans at great cost.

Instead of imaginative approach which uses different techniques that stimulate and ginger the curiosity of the learner, probes into the personal contributions and factors the originality of the child into the learning process, the traditional method of teaching was adopted. In the imaginative approach, the teacher is a coordinator rather than the repository of knowledge. In the traditional method, the teacher is the repertoire of knowledge. The bottom line of imagination is to be able to use one’s inner eyes to hypothesize, propound and develop an uncommon or new feat. It encourages thinking which is a cognitive activity-something which goes on in the mind and which requires the use of rational powers and faculties. But the traditional method is confined to the structure of the expressed thoughts, to the outcomes of thinking rather than thinking itself. The traditional method just transmits verbal knowledge or develops basic motor and perceptual skills.

The colonial education therefore created a black elite to succeed it and perpetuate its political and economic interests in the post-independence period. The Europeans wanted it that way. They don’t want to empower the locals so much for them to start asking questions.

While they were leaving, they did a greater harm. They chose Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a primary school teacher as Prime Minister instead of the highly cerebral Nnamdi Azikiwe. They needed someone who is pliable and who doesn’t understand the powerful forces that now rule men’s mind. So while we were basking in the euphoria of independence, we were actually being ruled from No. 10 Downing Street, London. The independent Africa was just wallowing in tasteless ideological soup, devoid of salt. Some Presidents who showed some flashes of intellectual robustness were overthrown or killed with the help of the West-Kwame Nkruma in Ghana, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso etc.

It wasn’t long before problems sprouted up. The Europeans knew it will surely happen. The military entered the stage. For the khaki boys to succeed, there was a need to stifle dissent and establish a reign of conformity. The evisceration of the right of dissent creates an atmosphere of groupthink. In the military fashion, it is ‘obey before complain’. They needed robots. The only way the military boys can achieve this was to undermine the education sector because education makes men’s mind difficult to enslave. And so they set out to deconstruct the education sector, cutting down the funding drastically. It was a protracted kulturkamf. Schools established by the missionaries were taken over forcefully by the government after the war. The little success built on what the colonialists left for us was reversed. Since then, it has been a progressive regression.

That was how we ended up with knowledgeable people without an iota of intelligence, people whose method of thinking is one way traffic, who have closed minds and cannot tolerate new ideas. That’s how we got to the era of smart phones and dumb people. That’s how we got to believe the saltine solution as an ebola cure. That’s how we got to the stage of being told to join the Amen chorus on facebook in order to get miracles, without knowing that for every chorus of amen we join, we kill a bulb of independence.

Ever wondered why a Mark Zuckerberg or a Steve Jobs cannot come from this shores?

Posted on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/amakeze.michaelchigozie/posts/872082786149366 by Amakeze Michael Chigozie. Retrieved September 9, 2014