Don tasks schools on pupils’ intelligence

Professor of Education Management at the University of Ibadan, Joel Babalola, has urged education providers across the country to consider all the elements that make up a complete individual and incorporate their development into teaching and learning. .

Babalola in a chat with The Guardian recently warned that failure to understand and integrate this into routine teaching and learning, would likely deny affected persons the pleasure of living a purposeful life. .

According to him, “In teaching a child, any school that is worth its onions must understand that a child does not have a head alone. A child has head, hand, heart, leg and other parts of the body. As you are developing the head, you must think about developing the heart and the hand so as to develop a total individual.”

For instance, he said it was imperative to focus on these three areas especially because the head deals with the mental aspect of our being, the heart with our emotional intelligence, while the hand has to do with competency intelligence. The child’s total intelligence has to be developed so that the person will not be intellectually capable, but without knowing what to do in life. Even if when such a person knows what to do in life, he may not be able to relate with people or the society, so education has to be total.” . He also cautioned stakeholders against depending on a particular sector to educate a child since the education of a child requires collective efforts from all concerned. .

“Home, schools, churches, mosques and the society at large should not forget that they have diverse roles to play. The home should not rely totally on schools, and schools should not depend on the church to handle the moral wellbeing of the children. .

“If what is done in schools is not complemented by all these other sectors, the whole effort would be in vain because the other sectors are capable of destroying all that have been done in schools.

He counseled schools to widen their learning horizon in the interest of the country and the future of the Nigerian child, adding that contemporary learning must be all encompassing.