Why Nigerian students need international exposure

An educationist, Bamidele Omotosho, says exposing Nigerian youths to international education helps in broadening their horizon in contemporary learning, and is ultimately beneficial to the country.

According to him, 21st Century knowledge requirement has gone beyond local territories, and now a function of how well a country learns from others, through her students.

Omotosho, a consultant, who spoke at the opening of Kalesanmi House, a residential training centre in Ikeja, Lagos State, observed that international education remains a global phenomenon, especially among fast developing countries, insisting that, “It has nothing to do with how rich or poor we are, because there are opportunities for scholarship for brilliant students. For instance, Management Education and Training Limited (MET), has promoted international education even among public schools in Lagos State and nine of their students have enjoyed scholarship to American university.

“The goal is to broaden the horizon of our best minds. There is no country that does not send its citizen to other countries to study, because this is important to development. While we were in University of Ibadan, so many foreign students from America, South Africa among others were coming to Nigeria to study. There are lots of Chinese and Japanese in American universities today; they are not there for the fun of it,” he said.

Omotosho, with over two decades of experience in international education and consultancy services, added that records of outstanding performance by Nigerian students overseas has shown that they are world-beaters, if given the necessary exposure.

His words: “The reason our students also go out there to be excellent is because of the environment and facilities that are far better than what we have here. The ratio of student to teacher is much lower than what we have here; averagely it is 20:1.

“The current environment still doesn’t bring out the best in Nigerian students. Besides ratio of student to teacher, poor motivation, some schools still don’t have libraries and power supply, amid poor accessibility to these schools.

“In the 1960s and 1970s when we were in the universities, nobody was interested in going overseas because we had the best of environment for learning and foreigners were almost begging to come here. In UI then, the total student population was 3, 000.

With the same structure today, but with little improvement, UI has 30, 000. LASU has about 100, 000.

“Again, the diversification of academic programme in Nigeria is still not enough, especially at the graduate level. Many Nigerians have no choice than to go to America for graduate programmes that are not available here,” Omotosho said.