Was there any attempt which might have triggered off the agitation that religious studies be removed from the curriculum?
There were no such intentions to scrap religion, and it is clearly written in the curriculum. In the new curriculum, you will see Religion and National Values, and you will see Islamic Studies and Christian Religious Studies separately, with Social Studies to be taught separately, same for Civic Education; the new addition is the awareness.
What we have done in ensuring harmony is that, in the old curriculum, there were repetitions of social studies content and civic education, so we aligned those content to where they ought to belong. Those ones that are strictly civic education that have to do with national values and civic responsibilities had been properly put under Civic Education and those ones that are strictly social studies, which have to do with government, history, geography and social relationship of community, have been put under Social Studies.
There is a new content of security which is not there before; we have carved out a subject matter called security awareness and this will be taught separately. Every child in the basic education programme will study social studies, civic education, security awareness as compulsory subjects; then those people that will like Islamic Studies, according to their faith, will study Islamic Studies as a separate subject, like the Christian Religious Studies, and this is applicable in schools where we have mixed religious beliefs. But all of them will take social studies, civic education and security awareness subjects together.
How many subjects do we have in the new basic education curriculum?
We used to have 20 single listing. We had English as a subject, mathematics, basic science, basic technology, then the languages under this listing, if you count them one by one, it will be 20. But now, we have been able to reorganise them into a maximum of 10.
For example, if you see basic science, basic technology and computer, they are now clustered under basic science and technology as one subject curriculum, but if you come to that subject curriculum, they will be taught differently as different unit courses.
In the old curriculum, they were single listed. Certain sections of basic technology were also listed in basic science, and it was conflicting. Now you will see basic science and basic technology. We have articulated them, although one will help in the understanding of the other; technology is the application for science. You have to understand the science before the application.
For instance, in the prevocational studies, we used to have agriculture and home economics as optional, and people said agriculture should not be optional; so it is now compulsory. All children must study agriculture under prevocational studies.
If you check the new curriculum, you see prevocational studies - agriculture, prevocational studies - home economics; they are compulsory, so you cannot say, ‘I am not going to do agriculture’ as it was in the old curriculum. If you look at those rearrangements, you have 10 maximum subjects in the curriculum.
The only optional one is Arabic, because not everybody does Arabic; it is only for the Islamic students because Arabic is the foundation of Islamic Studies.
Also, consumer education has been infused into business studies; if you go to business studies subject matter, you will see consumer education. You will see some aspect of consumer education has been infused into prevocational education, that is, agriculture component, home economics and business studies. You will see that aspects of consumer education have been infused.
There is what we call curriculum infusion. In consumer education, it has time management. We have it in environmental issues. Things connected to ICPC that have to do with national values, HIV/AIDS, you will not see it. Even in English studies you will see aspects of HIV/AIDS as comprehension to raise awareness of children.
If you go to agriculture, you will see consumer education. Agriculture is a big industry and government id promoting it to make the children more enterprising, and that has to do with consumer rights, consumer awareness - it runs across. When we do curriculum infusion, we identify the subjects we call career subjects.
Those career subjects are those in which you can infuse these emerging issues - consumer education, HIV/AIDS, road safety, etc. You may not see road safety as a subject matter but when going through business studies, agriculture, technology, you will see aspects of road safety education, disaster/risk management, consumer education; this is called curriculum enrichment as it is in line with international best practices so that when the child is learning business, at the same time he is also learning consumer rights, among others.
Any arrangement by the government to make funds available for the graduating students who may wish to establish themselves in any of the trades and entrepreneurship skills and how many schools have been developed to offer all these 34 vocational courses?
If somebody has acquired a skill in any of the trades and entrepreneurship disciplines, managing or establishing oneself won’t be a serious issue. Let’s put it this way: if a person doesn’t have a skill, that becomes worse; if you go through secondary school and upon graduating you don’t have any skill - nothing to depend on - you don’t even know where to begin, it is a serious matter.
Now, the new curriculum teaches the skills to become involved in enterprise, teaches one how to source funds, how to seek cooperation amongst your people. It creates awareness on where to go and seek funds, how to apply for such loans.
Government has a policy on supporting youths in the society: poverty alleviation is one, small scale and medium enterprises is another one. Some state governments are also providing some soft loan to youths, but if you are not aware of these schemes, even if you have the skills, you won’t know where to go. So part of things they are being taught is not just to acquire the skills, but to also be enterprising.
After learning how to make garment, barb hair, or hair dressing, painting or GSM repairs, the enterprise comes in here: how enterprising are my going to be? Where am I going to look out for? How am I going to apply for funds? How can I get the awareness of where to go to? Because if you have the skills and you don’t have the awareness of where to seek funds or how to cooperate with other people, there are a lot of opportunities people are not aware of and that is part of what they are going to be taught in school, not just the skills. The other issue is how school will manage the resources.
What we are trying to do is to start small, for instance, 34 entrepreneural skills, and we say that every child should learn one skill out of the 34 and schools will begin from the ones they have the facilities for and later scale up - it is not possible for a school to mount 34 skills entrepreneural equipment, but there are some which the schools can get, a school can start with business.
A school can start with IT skills, fishery or paint making; not only that, we have also sold the idea to government that, like in Lagos State, they have community resort that has some of these equipment serving a cluster of schools. Lagos has done that, other states, like Cross River State, have picked up that strategy.
Instead of replicating it in every school, they could build workshop that can serve a cluster of schools. One thing is important here: if you are starting an innovation, don’t expect that it will be implemented 100 per cent but you must start from somewhere - strategic planning. We tell people to start in a smaller scale. A school can begin with training people on GSM repairs, IT and later add more subject matter if they improve on their facilities.
This thing is not one-day show; it has a three years for implementation. The new curriculum for senior secondary school, we will start in year one. As we have started 2011-2012, the old curriculum will still be running. We go to year two - 2012-2013, and year three which 2013-2014, so we have three years’ plan of implementation and, in the process, we hope to improve the facilities, the resources; but if we say we must start it all at the same time, there must be problems.
Has the government also made arrangements for trainers or teachers as the case may be?
Following the same strategy, if we are preparing what is called teachers’ guide for each of this curriculum, there is a teacher’s guide and we also do training. My agency is doing what is called orientation, sensitisation and training but, beyond my agency, the National Commission for Colleges of Education, especially for the basic education, has taken the curriculum and upgrading the teacher training programme for colleges of education.
We hope that, in the next three years, the new crop of teachers that are coming will be able to cope but beyond that, the National Teachers Institute (NTI) is doing in-service training. Every year, they run it batch-by-batch for teachers who are already in school. My agency is also doing quick-win, that is train those who are on ground, sensitise them, give them teacher’s guide.
The long term win will be to train the teachers in institutions to be able to do this. Beyond that, we run programmes with universities’ faculties of education, and polytechnics that train teachers for senior secondary school (that was in 2009) envisaging the implementation of the programme from 2011 to revive what they teach in education department and faculties in line with the new secondary school curriculum.
We did that in 2009-2010 and the students that were admitted from 2010 will learn the new methodology, the new content, in line with the senior secondary school, so that when they graduate, they will be able to cope. So it is ongoing process, and what is important is to sustain the innovation, not just for those of us who are creating the curriculum, but also for teacher-trainers and those who are engaged in pre-service and in-service training.
Does your council have monitoring mechanisms to see that this curriculum is implemented across the country?
The council has zonal offices, and part of the functions of these zonal offices is to monitor the scheme. First of all, we distribute the curriculum, secondly we train teachers, thirdly we do assessment. We do periodic assessment to ascertain what is going on in schools.
We don’t only do assessment, we also find out how students are performing even as the curriculum is being implemented. There is an ongoing survey as to why the children fail in mathematics and English is based on the curriculum. So monitoring of curriculum distribution, implementation, training teachers and monitoring - these are all connected. We also encourage the states; we have given them information, especially inspectorate.
They work in tandem with us. You know, we cannot do everything; we have our different responsibilities. The state ministries of education have what they call department of supervision, department of inspectorate; they work hand-in-hand with us. When we provide the curriculum and then provide what is expected of us, they should also do theirs, but from our own level, we monitor through our zonal offices.
The new curriculum appears to have almost all the content of the old curriculum; how has that reduce the load?
This is a very good question. We got the experts, teacher-trainers, policy makers, curriculum experts to do what is called ‘gap analysis’ of the nine-year basic education curriculum. When you are asking where are the repetitions, if you pick social studies and civic education, for instance, there are so many repetitions. So those repetitions have been eliminated.
There were areas which were redundant - we discovered the redundant content that will not add value to the children - those ones have been eliminated. We also discovered that there are some subject matters that come together; we had basic science, basic technology, and IT - they are related.
So, we try to bring them together thereby eliminating redundancy and reducing subject overload. But, it is a tricky thing. How do you reduce subject overload and how do you retain quality. We didn’t throw away any subject; what we did was to eliminate wastages. Like in United States, there is what is called Human Arts. This is English and Creative Arts.
They put them together and called it Human Arts. Now we have English Studies. In the primary school, we don’t have English Literature and English Language; we have English studies - they are brought together, but you can have both English Language and English Literature as you go beyond the primary school.
These things I am talking about, if you get into the senior secondary school, for instance, the basic science and basic technology formed the foundation for physics, chemistry and biology. They are separate but in the primary school you have basic science and technology as a foundation. You have social studies, in which are integrated history, geography and government.
So, the curriculum experts have compressed the curriculum and retained the core content necessary to build the foundation at the level without losing quality. So as our children grow beyond the primary school, senior secondary school, they now expand into different subjects, having got the foundation.
Is there any plan to also inculcate reading as a subject in the new curriculum?
That is exactly what we are doing now. There is a process going on now; we are trying to inculcate reading as a component in Primary 1 - 3. Internationally and by research, we discovered that reading is better taught in the lower arms of primary school to lay the foundations of reading, because if a child cannot read, he may not be able to comprehend what is taught in other subjects. She will need to read because that is the basis of education - reading is very critical.
In the nine years basic, there was nothing like reading; in those days, reading was being taught but we lost that, but we are bringing back how to teach reading, because it is an art. If you give an American a text book and tell him to go, read and summarise, in the next two hours he will likely tell you everything about that book because of the art of reading which has been inculcated in him, but if you give a Nigerian of the same age the same book to read and summarise, it will take him over four days. In the art of reading, you capture the most essential thing so that within few hours you will tell what is in that book.
So, reading is very critical and what we are doing now is bring in reading as a thing to be learned. By the time the curriculum is released, you will see it from Primary 1 - 3.
But despite all these efforts, you still see Nigerian students perform so poorly in exams; what is the disconnect?
When it comes to students’ performance, how far or to what extent they can learn what they are taught, a number of factors come into play: do we have teachers with the right capacity to teach? What about the facilities, the environment, support? In the student’s curriculum - what they are being taught, do they match their level of understanding? There are a variety of factors that influence students’ performance.
It is not just the curriculum, but teaching is most critical, because no nation can go beyond the capacity of her teachers. If you don’t bring up the teachers properly, just forget about it: there must be capital investment in the teacher. If a teacher doesn’t have a facility, the human capital could negate what you teach, but if you have all the facilities and the person does not have the art of teaching - maybe she couldn’t use the available facilities - it becomes a problem. Teaching capital is very fundamental.
It is not the only one, but I could say, from a professional point of view, it is very key. So one of the reasons is that teachers’ capacity need to be supported, and even if they have the qualification to teach, are they well motivated? Motivation is very vital here. I could be a well-qualified graduate teacher of mathematics and if my salaries are paid three months in arrears, I won’t go to teach, and whereby I don’t go to teach, how will the children learn?
So, beside the capital content, the remuneration, is it commensurate? The learning environment is another factor. These are all connected, but above all, let us get it right with the teachers first. You can also broaden the argument beyond the teachers’ capacity.
Some students now prefer to cheat in exam than to read. You can see parents during common entrance examinations standing by the window, writing for their wards. So parents have a portion of the blame.
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