Why Nigeria needs to pay better attention to basic education

schools
It has been well acknowledged that primary school education is the foundation of individual and
national development. The skills learned at that level are the base on which the capacity for
future economic productivity is built.
Primary School Education takes up the first six years of Nigeria’s nine-year Basic Education
Curriculum which seeks to give every child resident in Nigeria an adequate foundation for a
successful and productive life.
The nine-year Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) covers ten subjects: Mathematics; Basic
Science and Technology; English Studies; Religion and National Values; Cultural and Creative
Arts; Business Studies; Nigerian Languages; Pre-vocational Studies; French; and Arabic.
In addition to these technical skills, primary school education is also a vital component of the
socialisation structure that looks to teach children the socially acceptable norms, beliefs, values,
and behaviours that they are expected to align with for successful integration into society.
This means that whenever children are deprived of quality primary school education, they are at
risk of having a damaged foundation that exposes them to the likelihood of lifelong technical and
social incompetence that impairs their chances of achieving adequate integration into the family,
workplace, and society as a whole and if a significant portion of a society’s children are deprived
of proper primary school education, then the society itself is likely to eventually pay a high
social and economic cost
With this in mind, it becomes easier to grasp the importance of the statistic that says that 20% of
the world’s out-of-school children are in Nigeria. Primary education in Nigeria is compulsory
and is officially free in public schools but UNICEF data says that something approaching 20
million Nigerian children between the ages of 5-14 years are out of school. These figures become
even scarier when you take the data from the NBS’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey into
account. 61 percent of 6-11 year-olds regularly attend primary school and only 35.6 percent of
children aged 36-59 months receive early childhood education.
Regional breakdowns of early education enrollment and school attendance rates give a clearer
view of the issue. The Northern part of the country has very troubling school attendance rates
with states like Bornu, Bauchi, Sokoto, Gombe, and others with out-of-school rates that hovered
between 48-60% and early education enrollment rates that were in the 3-7%.
The out-of-school rates in the regions outside the North were much better with one-digit
percentage figures being the norm but the poor early enrollment figures give cause for concern
because it suggests that the primary school education process is not begun on time by most
children in the country and it gets worrying when we consider the actual quality of the primary
education being offered. Worryingly, the Southeast had poor early enrollment rates that were in
the 6-12% range with Anambra State having strikingly poor figures with over 20% being out of
school partly due to the insecurity related to the IPOB situation while Ebonyi showed growth
with a 20% early enrollment rate that was the highest in the country.
The out-of-school figures for female children in the core Northern regions were very troubling
because they showed that almost 60% of girls in those areas are out of school and are being
deprived of the education that would equip them with the tools required for optimal
socioeconomic performance. Hopefully, the insecurity and the cultural barriers that help keep the
girl child from education are soon dealt with.
The socialisation role of primary school education deserves to be better appreciated and
enhanced significantly in Nigeria, especially in the troubled zones where locals are indulging in
antisocial and destructive behaviour that exists partly because people were not adequately
conditioned by an effective socialisation process that would have been made available by a
proper primary school education system.