It is not yet time to return fully to our colloquium on “better universities and concomitant advantages” this week. There have been several issues in the news that could engage our overstressed attention too. There has been an issue of why the chief executive of the federation has at last appointed a nine-man board of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and six of the nine are from the North including the Chief Of Staff (COAS) to the President. Some adversarial sources have asked why the president who is the senior minister of petroleum resources had to load the board with his own people. Some motor-park analysts have also questioned why the Nigerian leader did not use the NNPC board appointments to defuse tension in the South East and South South where some agitators have been raising dust relating to the national question. There have been leaked reports of continued discovery of secret accounts remotely linked to a former state actor in the aviation ministry.

There was a particular unverified report of an aide to a former minister of aviation who was said to have been the treasurer of his former boss. The story is still not clear whether there has been some correlation between the confiscated bank account and the former minister’s net worth. There hasn’t been any confirmation about whether there was a court order to confiscate the bank accounts being published. It is understood that it is risky to ask questions about due process in these perilous times when there is some sense of urgency in fighting the monster called corruption in the country. In this small new world that social technologies daily disrupt at a pace that print journalists can hardly cope with, there have been some stories that can’t be ignored, anyway. For instance, Lionel Messi, one of the most significant faces in global football context has had some brush with the law in Spain where he made his name. He and his father who serves as his business manager have had to face the full wrath of the law as they have been found guilty of tax fraud. Some Nigerian commentators who may not know how the law rules elsewhere, have been wondering how a famous five times World Footballer of the Year had to be docked for alleged tax fraud. Spain is not Nigeria where the (big) man rules instead of the law. In Nigeria, a wealthy Messi and his father would have dispatched some influential lawyers to a high court for a perpetual injunction. And in America, their America, the FBI could not find pieces of evidence to indict presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton over the controversial personal email address allegedly used for official transactions. The FBI may need some lessons from Nigerian police force on how to conduct forensic inquiries on alleged forgery without interviewing the principal suspects. These are some issues worth commenting on in Nigeria that just declared three days of public holidays instead of two, thanks to some interior ministry’s officials who were sleeping on duty.

Despite all these matters miscellaneous this week, I would like us to reflect on one other vexatious issue about the state of education in Nigeria. While reflecting on the state of the universities, which has been the main pre-occupation of this column for some time, I stumbled on a related trouble: The state of teachers, especially in the public primary and secondary schools. We have been discussing the grave implications of the 27 states that have been unable to pay salaries of workers in the country. But we hardly remember that the unpaid workers include teachers of our children, who should be leaders of tomorrow.

This lamentation is not about what Abuja, Nigeria’s capital has been unable to do. It is about the 36 states and 774 local governments in the country. It is about the people and the future of the country. Despite the way we are, elders of the land should rise and speak up for a definite but significant policy at all levels for teachers and, of course, how to make teaching attractive to quality graduates.

And then how to organize purposeful restoration of teacher education, a paradise we lost in 1980 when National Teachers Institute was inaugurated in Kaduna and thereafter, Teachers’ Training Colleges were phased out.

This is a call on our leaders to bear in mind that quality in education is part of what should be pursued to address all forms of poverty, material, spiritual, social and economic…And we need to know enough to know that unless we honestly address the material condition of teachers all over the country the way Finland has decisively and comprehensively done, we will continue to grope in the dark and compromise the future of this country. And here is the thing, we need some state governments that can show even the federal government how to reform and revamp education quality through unprecedented attention to teachers who can be more important than the permanent secretaries in the state service. This suggestion is coming at a time even the global supreme intelligence on business and economy, the London-based The Economist joined the fray in the global appeal for attention to teachers.

In its edition dated June 11th 2016, the influential journal wrote in an editorial: “FORGET smart uniforms and small classes. The secret to stellar grades and thriving students is teachers. One American study found that in a single year’s teaching the top 10% of teachers impart three times as much learning to their pupils as the worst 10% do. Another suggests that, if black pupils were taught by the best quarter of teachers, the gap between their achievement and that of white pupils would disappear…”

The Economist continues as if it was talking to our leaders here: “Education has a history of lurching from one miracle solution to the next. The best of them even do some good. Teach for America, and the dozens of organisations it has inspired in other countries, has brought ambitious, energetic new graduates into the profession. And dismissing teachers for bad performance has boosted results in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

“But each approach has its limits. Teaching is a mass profession: it cannot grab all the top graduates, year after year. When poor teachers are fired, new ones are needed—and they will have been trained in the very same system that failed to make fine teachers out of their predecessors.

“By contrast, the idea of improving the average teacher could revolutionise the entire profession. Around the world, few teachers are well enough prepared before being let loose on children. In poor countries many get little training of any kind. A recent report found 31 countries in which more than a quarter of primary-school teachers had not reached (minimal) national standards. In rich countries the problem is more subtle. “Teachers qualify following a long, specialised course. This will often involve airy discussions of theory—on ecopedagogy, possibly, or conscientisation (don’t ask). Some of these courses, including masters degrees in education, have no effect on how well their graduates’ pupils end up being taught.

“What teachers fail to learn in universities and teacher-training colleges they rarely pick up on the job. They become better teachers in their first few years as they get to grips with real pupils in real classrooms, but after that improvements tail off. This is largely because schools neglect their most important pupils: teachers themselves….

Trainees should spend more time in the classroom. The places where pupils do best, for example Finland, Singapore and Shanghai, put novice teachers through a demanding apprenticeship. In America high-performing charter schools teach trainees in the classroom and bring them on with coaching and feedback…”
We don’t need to say more than what the leader writers at The Economist have done for us, in this regard. The point is that teachers need intense training, not the crash programme we do here through seminars. National Teachers Institute, Kaduna has proved inadequate. Faculties of Education in Nigerian universities are filled with students who never chose education subjects as even a second choice. Most of them have been drafted because of cut-off point challenges from examinations for desired courses. Besides, no one wants to teach in Nigeria where teachers are derided. In Finland, they are not only well groomed to teach, they are also recognized as national heroes and as the most important to be admitted into the universities. The best students are chosen for very competitive teacher education.. What is more, Finish teachers are better paid than their peers and enjoy a lighter teaching workload than their average.

The message to all our leaders here is that there will be no progress anywhere if we do not separate teachers of our children from general workers that we would not like to pay. Let’s dignify our teachers. The starting point should be how to attract our excellent graduates, our first class brains into teaching. Yes, teaching! Our leaders need to recognize what Professor Steven R. Covey said about the value of quality in education in 1976: He said: “The main value of education is not financial or occupational, but it is personal and spiritual and character building. You can become a better husband and father, wife and mother and citizen. You learn to think analytically and creatively…

“You learn how to read with discrimination. You develop a way of thinking about life and problems. Your basic knowledge is deepened and expanded, your horizons lifted… In every way you can become a fuller and more integrated, more capable and wider human being…”
I think we cannot achieve this through miracles that exclude special attention to teachers in our schools.

Inside Stuff Grammar School:

Diffuse Vs Defuse:
This school has discovered that some writers and speakers confuse these words a great deal. Examples: It is wrong to write: The president has moved to ‘diffuse’ tension in the Niger Delta area. The correct word here (used as a verb) is ‘defuse’. Diffuse means: to pour out and spread; to spread or scatter widely or thinly; disseminate…and defuse means: to remove the fuze/fuse from (a bomb, mine, etc.); to make less dangerous, tense, or embarrassing as in: to defuse a potentially ugly situation. So, note that, these ate troublesome words in English. The governor of Delta state has moved to defuse frayed nerves in the state. She had to think of a way to diffuse Jonny, before he blew them all up, and get Ash back. With open pans, the vapour is free to diffuse itself into the atmosphere, and the evaporation is perhaps more rapid. Note that diffuse can be used as an adjective too as in: In many passages, the sacred book falls into a diffuse preaching style, others seem more like proclamations or general orders.