Tackling education’s woes beyond distraction of age requirement
The federal government’s knee-jerk enforcement of the minimum age requirement for Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE) and admission into institutions of higher learning constitutes a distraction from the main priorities and urgency of curing the ailing education sector. The reactions that attended government’s announcement were predictable but avoidable had the government fully addressed the sensitive issue. For all it is worth, the age policy is not new, and its belated enforcement or otherwise should be the least of the worries of the current handlers of the declining education system. Importantly, being a general rule observed almost uniformly across the globe, the government should also have made provisions for exceptions to the rule as it relates to special classes of students.
In a manner suggestive of fishing for media relevance, the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, recently announced on national television that the federal government had instituted the age policy for secondary school leaving examinations, setting the minimum age at 18. Mamman added that the federal government directed the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Examination Council (NECO) that conduct the West African Senior School Certificate Examination and the Senior School Certificate Examination, respectively, to enforce the 18-year age requirement for candidates wishing to take these exams.
Mamman confirmed that the age requirement to undertake the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, overseen by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, would also be 18. He said: “What we did at the meeting that we had with JAMB (in July) was to allow this year, and for it to serve as a kind of notice for parents that this year, JAMB will admit students who are below that age, but from next year, JAMB is going to insist that anybody applying to go to university in Nigeria meets the required age which is 18. For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a new policy; this is a policy that has been there for a long time.”
What Mamman didn’t say, though a dangling reality is that from 2025, the under-18 SS3 school pupils will be ineligible to sit for WAEC and NECO examinations, nor hope to gain admission into the various higher institutions in Nigeria. Technically, the current 14 to 16-year-old pupils in SS2 this September 2024, would have to truncate their educational aspiration and growth till they are 18 years before they are eligible for the final examination or hope to gain varsity admission to continue their educational career.
Mamman was right about the longevity of the age-cap policy in having only matured wards eligible for higher education. The 1982 education policy, also called the 6-3-3-4 system, requires that children should be at least five years old to start pre-primary school and at least six years old to start primary school. The anticipation is that if a six-year-old spends six years in primary school, three years in junior secondary school, and another three years in senior secondary school, he or she will be 18 by the time he graduates from secondary school. With the legal adulthood set at 18 years and adjudged the age of full emotional and social maturity, they are scientifically prepared for the rigours of higher education, independence to cater for themselves, and a seamless transition into full adulthood. That is the norm in most parts of the world, except in cases of specially gifted children who develop those attributes much earlier than their mates.
Tellingly, the world has evolved significantly since 1982 to date. The world of work and role differentiation of couples in a family has changed. Substantially gone are the days when mothers squarely faced home affairs and child tendering, while paterfamilias worked to finance the family. Today, both couples are just as neck-deep in career pursuits, the world of work, and children thrust into school settings at infancy. In connivance with malleable private schools that are often the beneficiary of early enrolments, wards readily bridge the time-tested tradition and are hurriedly made ready for university admission before age 18! The routine challenge is instances of one too many ‘babies’ in the higher institutions where they could not find their feet, turning to be maladjusted adults and creating anxiety in society.
But beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the clear age-long loophole in the dysfunctional system, how come the same system, especially WAEC, NECO and JAMB, indulged the illegality of candidates shunting the age line without a pushback? If the problem had taken several years to incubate without a check, it would be unfair to punish the children itching to complete secondary education in 2025 and stall their progress because of a problem that is not of their creation. The policy is the policy, but its implementation is obnoxious and self-defeating in keeping SS3 students at home because they are not yet 18! The systematic enforcement of the policy should be more clearheaded in approach to ensure a non-disruption of the children’s progress.
Mamman and co. should remember that the Nigerian educational system has a peculiar problem. Nowhere in the world is there an unwieldy population of 20 million out-of-school children, and the government of the day has no clear plan to detonate the disaster waiting to happen. Such is not the right environment to freely add to the toll through a blanket implementation of a rusty policy without first reviewing it to accommodate emerging nuances. The policy should factor in the role of universities and other higher institutions, in exercising their autonomy to accommodate tested exceptionally gifted children without the bureaucracy of age cap. It is the norm globally and to do contrary is to consistently lose out in the globalisation trends, where talents and rare skills are steadily fluid and finding homes where they are better appreciated. Instead of losing them to the preying eyes of more developed countries, truly exceptional bright children must be accommodated by the policy, and those eligible for WAEC and NECO examinations in 2025 should be accommodated.
Beyond the fixation on age qualification, there are more germane concerns to deal with in the education system and review the age policy. Specifically, what exactly does Nigeria want to achieve with its education system, with the youths, by what framework, deliverables and timelines? Suffice it to note that opportunities in the contemporary world are getting scarce, and so too are the chances of youth surviving the economic blows of the warp system. Even for the 18-year-plus varsity freshmen, there is no guarantee of completing their higher education in four or five years. Our schools are routinely unsettled, perennially battling power outages, hikes in electricity tariffs, strikes, internal wrangling, and so on. It is for that reason that a lot of graduates today have exceeded the 30-year peg and are ineligible for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) on the day of their convocation. Therefore, they are facing an uphill task in finding available reputable jobs that are now made exclusive to graduates in their early 20s.
Those are glaring imbalances in the system that should be harmonised to ensure that no Nigerian youth is left out. To leave those existential issues unattended but hankering on an 18-year qualification for senior secondary school graduation is sheer pretence and mockery of the real hard work of policy overhaul that the education system needs urgently.
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