The setting was the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) Ile Ife and it was in the early 1980s prior to a scheduled inaugural lecture. Amid a rapport of some grey-haired professors at the Oduduwa Hall, who teasingly said; ‘there were professors in this university and per chance other professors and we, who were the real professors indeed knew ourselves!’
Drawing deductive cues from the banters of that folk of eggheads; someone, some time ago, contended that the award or acquisition of a university degree is a conspiracy of just a few. By inference, the power of when, why, what and how to be certificated is largely dependent on the prerogatives of the fellow(s) doing the certification.
Even at that, this contestable position was several decades ago, as against what certification is currently. At another time, someone else described a university graduate or a product of a tertiary academic setup as one so trained, presumably, that he or she should be a solution provider and creatively do rational thinking for the society’s problems and thereby make it a better place.
Equipped with this logical finesse, this elitist corps thinks out of the conventional box and brings up innovative ideas to do things quite differently and extraordinarily. On being faced with nerve-wrecking circumstances, a graduate as a ‘battle commander is expected to go to his/her war room and come out smoking’ with superior ideas to tackle ensuing problems.
Classically, was this not a similar driving force that propelled Bill Gates, said to have dropped off his university enrolment in pursuit of other life calling? Today, not only is Mr. Gates advertised as the world’s richest man, but he is reputed to be so fulfilled in the global super-highway technology service and for him, this was a bountiful reward for daring to be different from the rest of the crowd which a soundly university-grounded fellow is expected to be.
In the long-gone era, man was simply measured by the yardsticks of one’s rate of literacy and numeracy and armed with this, the more literate and deeply numerate one was, the weightier the vista of ample opportunities one could access. To a fairly measurable extent, one’s attained ‘modern civilisation’, mental acumen and other related achievement-indicators are mostly determined by how literate and numerate one is.
Arguably, this is one error of universal judgment committed against those, who for one or another reason, lack formal education.
Agreed, it is more than a settled matter that illiteracy is a dysfunctional disease which can certainly lead to avoidable societal problems such as population explosion amid squalor and depravity; compounded ill-health issues vis-a-vis poor hygienic habits, rascality or terrorism by other means as well as being ready tools of misuse or agents of dislocation. Standing at the other end is the multifaceted tool of education often used to tackle the roots of illiteracy and related problems.
In a case where a society only makes available educational pursuits without the endpoint provisions for those so educated might amount to a production line endlessly churning out products without due market surveys, advertisement packages, enhancement programmes and sundry shock-absorbing capacities.
Often times, this suggests more of resource inadequacy, policy somersault and lack of focus which has a compromising ally in sheer idiocy and annoying laziness on the part of those who are just ready to do anything to acquire this ‘so-called degree of learning’. For so long a period has mere certification of literacy and numeracy been mistaken for functional education, whereas both are a means to the distant route of getting along this enduring teaching of a life-time.
Among the easy indicators of sound literacy and sane numeracy are the easy flow-charts and effective usage of collated information, sieved data, acquired knowledge and applied wisdom. Just around this connecting bend awaits the high level of the afore-mentioned flowcharts, which if freely mixed with one’s sense of decorum, integrity and character largely push the building mechanisms of how one is diversely educated.
However, education is said to be a never-ending exercise that starts from the womb and lasts throughout life course. As a calling of sort, which each and everyone has to live up to; it requires guided features of cultivated manners and idiosyncratic dispositions toward its full attainment.
Contrary to the wrong perception of its attainment as a vocation; education is an engaging preoccupation fired by a life-long passion and not just a passing glance. Education for that matter has an igniting power to charge the inherent potentials of those seeking its beneficial impact by pushing them toward a set-mark of perfection in one or another way. Granted, nothing can be more demeaning for a nominally certificated person to be deceitfully labeled an ‘educated fellow’ and in a place where the craze for empty titles and appellations borders on insanity; it should not be surprising to be persistently assailed with such ridiculous cases.
Funny enough, in this theatric part of the world are the common melodramatics like ‘Professor, Doctor, Chief, Engineer, Pastor or Alhaji’ all borne by one and same person. Whereas, in a sane and functional environ, the ‘bearers of such titles’ should, ordinarily, have been subjected to mental analysis and put under psychopathic watch!
In another dimension is that group of the really gifted in virtually all areas of life but who can not self-certificate themselves and despite their enormous endowments, they have to conform with existing norms to be certificated even by the less endowed, in comparative terms. Such was the case of Nigeria’s own, Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who was reputed to have graduated on the third class rating from the University of Ibadan.
Obviously feeling out of place with this academic low-grading; he proceeded to the University of Leeds where he picked a first class point and ever since has this somewhat nonconformist been regarded as a global literary giant; a ‘word-smith and a virtual law unto himself’! Also abounding are quite intelligent and witty individuals who have suffered restraining limitations as a consequence of not being formally certificated as literate, wrongly underrated or not just recognised as expected.
At times, in the public domain and market place where ideas freely contend; the ‘logical reasoning and native wisdom of the so-called uneducated’ can be so enlightening and piercing that one empathises with them for not ‘being educated in the ways of the world’.
Differently, humanity and what it stands for would perhaps have rated them otherwise if they had been formally certificated. Henry Ford (the founder of Ford Motor Company) was a very exceptional case and, if not by the stroke of luck, would have been eased off as a non-relevance or an unmarked historical relic because of not ‘being educated enough’.
In the outer section of the society, possession of academic qualification has been raised to an artificially-induced height that the attached siege-mentality to attaining such certificates is condemnable and ridiculous. Not surprising are the forbidden vices of cynical disorientation, false sense of purpose, moral laxity and the ‘ever-readiness to purchase such certificates at any cost; cash-at-hand or by other cashless means’.
Left to painfully suffer in places where the aforementioned vices negatively prevail are the suppressed virtues of required skill, logical reasoning, brilliance of ideas, service excellence and fertile mindset so needed to make things happen positively.
Even on scriptural prompting, any part of the world that has an ‘uneducated tag’ is distantly discarded as a dark spot under satanic subjugation, which may though be heavenly conscious is earthly useless. And with no visible assurance or certainty of a secure future, such a concentration of people is said to be in a state of complete void and thickening darkness.
At the point of being mischievous, the uneducated is often scorned as an ‘irredeemable infidel’ and so regularly such can be located among the wretched, down- and out-trodden of the earth. On the other hand, the guiding function of sound education can hardly be over-stretched, because, as expected, the educated ones form part of the good citizens who pay their tax, perform their civic obligation, support government’s programmes and, by further extension, actively participate in policy formulation, execution and review.
• Omolade, [email protected]
• TO BE CONTINUED
