Social Listening: Focus on new education policy erecting barriers to early education.

1. Focus on new education policy erecting barriers to early education.

The new Federal Government policy stipulating a minimum age of 18 years before any Nigerian child can enter a university has set tongues wagging on social media. The response has been majorly negative and critical.

Social Listening captured two responses on Facebook and WhatsApp.

A. In Mamman Tahir’s Nigeria, a 15-year-old can marry and bring forth children, but she cannot write exams or further her education.

© Moses Oladele Idowu on Facebook, X, and WhatsApp.

I am troubled by the kind of mind that superintends our educational policies at the highest levels. I am troubled by the sheer woodenheadedness behind this policy and the tragedy it would bring to many children if implemented. Ronald Reagan’s observation that “the government is the problem” has now found fulfilment in APC and the Tinubu administration.

Let us examine this policy and see the tragedy it would bring before going into its foolishness.

First, consider that most of the children in the final year or semi-final year in most secondary schools today, both private and public, are in their 15th or 16th year of age. If this policy is implemented this year or even next year, it means only some students in our private schools will enrol students for WAEC/NECO. I know this to be true in the Southwest and the South. It then means many schools and parents may resort to fraud by forging the birth certificates of their children or withdrawing the children after completing secondary education to wait at home for another two years till they are eligible to write the exams.

Do you get it? A child who has been leading the class from the first year of school and now gets to the final year at 16 cannot write the exams to proceed to the next stage of tertiary education not because he/she is unwilling or unable but because a government has ambushed him with a bad policy, the product of beclouded, locked-in thinking and confusion.

Think of students getting to the final year at the top of the class and being stopped from writing exams because they are underage at 16 or 15. Where would they be going when both parents go to work? It is different if the government is considering bridging education as a stopgap. Would they start learning a trade after going to school while waiting till they are eligible to write an examination? Would they still be smart enough to remember what they learned after two years of staying at home doing nothing? What will they do at home until 18 since there is no almajiri system in the South?

Where is this policy leading to? Who is bent on destroying the educational foundations of the South and especially the West?
Before now, the standard age of admission to universities was 16. Has any university complained to the Minister of Education that her students cannot cope with the intellectual rigour?

Two, if you look at the pattern of examination results in the last few years, you will see that this policy needs to be better thought out. Most of the highest scorers in both WAEC/NECO/ UTME in the last few years have been under -17, and the examination standard has remained the same. Also, look at most First-Class awardees from the universities and their age; they were mostly those who got admission at 16.

If, therefore, the students are coping at 16 years of age, why extend it to 18 if not a sinister agenda to destroy and truncate the educational hopes of a section of the country?

In Mamman Tahir’s North, the government is conducting mass weddings and giving 15-year-olds in marriage to procreate children to swell their population for increased votes during the election (?). What have Minister Tahir and other elites of the North done about this? But his worry is to stop 16-year-olds from furthering their educational career. So, in Tahir’s Nigeria, a 15-year-old can marry and bring forth children, but she cannot write exams or further her education.

2. Don’t retard your geniuses.

Michael Kearney.

Michael Kearney holds the Guinness World Book Record as the youngest college graduate. He graduated in 1994 at ten years and four months; that record has been intact. Michael was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, where his mother homeschooled him.

*Don’t retard your geniuses! Don’t slow them down because they can’t wait & they won’t wait for any radarada (nonsense).

If you like in your own country, let all your brilliant children become “Agbalagbi”, Boda Sule or Iya Michael before they go to school.

Adeola Soetan in Contact G WhatsApp platform.

Additional information on Kearney.

Before Michael Kearney could walk, he had started mastering the English language. Michael bore the hallmarks of a child prodigy when he spoke his first word at four months old.

Michael’s parents home-schooled him, and his intellectual development accelerated at a head-spinning pace. Fast-tracked through high school and college, Michael enrolled at the University of South Alabama in 1992 at the age of eight.

Two years later, at age 10, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, entering the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest university graduate—an extraordinary feat that remains unsurpassed to this day.

More academic success—including two Master’s degrees—followed in his teens and 20s, culminating in a PhD and a trivia-and-puzzle game show appearance that won him $1m (£759,000).

BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50856999