By Francis Ewherido
Frustration has recently pushed some youths to describe education as a scam. It didn’t start now. It is only getting louder as it is becoming harder for graduates to get employment. I want to be very clear from the beginning. Wikipedia defines education in its simplest form as “the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits.” Apparently, these youths are referring to “formal education.” Wikipedia says, “formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum.” So the frustration of these youngsters is with formal education. I believe their thinking it is partly misplaced because education starts from the home after birth.
The truth is that you cannot divorce formal education from informal education, especially at this critical stage when the unemployment rate of youths in Nigeria is alarming. Also informal education is continuous and “involves unstructured learning through daily experiences.” Reducing unemployment in Nigeria has to be multi-faced. In previous articles, I wrote about the need for universities and polytechnics to rejig their curricula to enable them produce graduates who are self-starters and can hit the ground running. Currently, there are quite a number of half-baked and unemployable graduates who can’t defend the certificates they are flaunting. But there are also graduates who are looking for job opportunities.
Since education starts from the family, I want to start from there. Any parent with two or more children knows that children are different in character, temperament, innate gifts, skills, etc. From a very tender age, say age one or even less, these tendencies begin to manifest. Every parent needs to be observant of his/her children. You cannot solve a problem you do not understand or proffer solutions to situations you are ignorant of. There are some children who are very inquisitive. They will ask questions until they wear you out. If you have such a child pay attention to his likes, interests and other gifts. You might just be dealing with a future lawyer (advocate), detective, etc. Keep an eye of the child as she grows older. With proper guidance, she will discover her calling early and pursue it.
By the time your child is in senior secondary school, she should know what she wants to become in life. But not everybody has this clarity of purpose. That is where the role of parents as mentors becomes very important. Guide your children on a journey of self-discovery to know what they want in life. As a rule, I ask every student in senior secondary school I come across what their interests are and what they want to study in the university. Last Tuesday, one of my godsons and the father came to visit me. I asked him the same question and he said computer science. I asked him what informed his choice…
A father had two daughters in the same school. Their school gave them two booklets of tickets to sell to raise funds for charity. The younger one sold her tickets in on no time. In fact, she sold them within two Sundays in church. Meanwhile, the older daughter had not sold up to 10 leaflets in the booklet containing 50 leaflets after almost a month. The father took the booklet and promised to help her sell them to his colleagues in the office. He wanted to save her the humiliation of failing while her younger sibling succeeded. But he learnt a major lesson from the incident. He said he would encourage the elder daughter think about working as a researcher or a computer engineer, programmer, or any job that does not require much interpersonal skills. I do not need to tell you that the younger daughter will be a great marketer or succeed in professions that require much interpersonal skills.
Another parent has an inquisitive and restless son. He was also never satisfied with the status quo. He always questioned the status quo and offered what he thought would be better solutions. His father called him one day and told him that “son, even if all your siblings want to relocate abroad, I beg you to stay in Nigeria. Your future lies here. You are a solution provider. Nigeria has many problems and in need of solution providers. The young man listened to his father and stayed back. He made his millions while he was still an undergraduate. He’s doing very well today. If you interact with him, you know immediately that he is a special breed. But not all children are gifted like him. Some of children need to be specially mentored. At the end of the day, they are all diamonds. Some are just rough diamonds and need to be polished. Their beauty (greatness) cannot come to fruition unless they are polished(mentored). That is partly why parenting is serious business. It is not supposed to be an all-comers affair. But nature has made it so.
We should not mix up mentorship with parents deciding what their children should study. I thought it was old-fashioned, but it is still happening. There were some successful professionals (lawyers and medical doctors, especially) who forced their children to study law or medicine so that they could take over the chambers or clinics/hospitals. Where the children were naturally inclined, it went well, but when the children had other interests, the outcome was different. Let your children pursue their passion. Dr. Deji Adeleke owns a business empire. Today, many people know him as Davido’s father. Father and son had their battles before he allowed Davido to pursue his music career. Now, both of them are happy.
I focus on the family unit because we operate in a society where people are better off if they are in charge of their lives as much as possible. There are many things the system provides abroad that we have to provide for ourselves here. It might seem selfish and parochial, but you have to sort out the home front first before you move on to solve societal problems. As a parent you should prepare your children to be in charge in their lives. Abroad the school system is well structured to help children know their strengths, but it is absent here. When it is available, it is mechanical.
There are some basic factors that have shaped the lives of many educated people currently from ages 45 to 60: the courses they studied in the university, why they chose the courses, their career paths and clarity of their choices of career. We also have their choice of spouses. If you studied what you love and have a natural flair for, your probability of success is enhanced. Also, even without initial clarity, if you stumble on a career/business and grow into it, the probability of success is also very high. I will not delve into choice of spouse because the story is too long to accommodate in this article. The other critical choice is whether to take employment, grow in your career, and retire at the retirement age, or start a business at the right time and grow it. Wrong choices have arrested the development of many people within the age group above. Timing is very critical in situations when people leave paid employment to own a business or be self-employed. Also, a career-oriented person has no business going into business until after retirement. It can easily become a vicious cycle until the person dies or grows too old to run the business. Do not look afar. The examples are all around us.
