In Nigeria’s education system, presentation of handcraft is a common exercise and part of the requirements every nursery or primary school pupil must provide before completion.
Accordingly, it is an activity that brings to stage amazing kids to exhibit ingenuity and skills by way of submitting crafted materials to their teachers where, sometimes, emerging trends and innovations to the larger world get to be discovered.
Billed for the end of term of every academic session, very young talents are often seen lining up to participate and quiz for the remarks of resounding performance while the teachers assess and assign them grades in line with elementary education curriculum.
This is aside offering convenient platform for experiment, drawing the kids far beyond theoretical explanations to a more pragmatic instance while simultaneously affording their teachers with special session to identifying best hands and see the prospects of developing very interesting and advanced ideas in them.
Unfortunately, today, some league of excessively corrupt and greedy minded miscreants unfittingly occupying the esteemed positions of being teachers in our various public and private nursery and primary schools have, other than the common habit of imparting sound background knowledge to the pupils, unlawfully recruit themselves into kinds of outrageous activities, deviating from their primary responsibilities.
Specifically, some of our primary school teachers are fun of extorting the pupils under the shade of collecting handcrafts.
It miffed me beyond measure when for instance, my niece and a primary 3 pupil whose name i wouldn’t mention came to ask of money to buy noodles and airtime both of which were said to be presented as Handcrafts to her form master in school.
As a guardian I became completely shocked and amazed as I tried to inquire why she was buying airtime and noodles instead of crafting ideas which I believe is the basis behind introducing the framework.
The young lad, regrettably looking straight and scary into my eyes said our teacher would ensure I failed in the event I submitted materials I have personally crafted, nothing however that they (teachers) now prefer noodles, airtime and alike other than crafted ideas. ANDCRAFTING THE TEACHERS’ POCKETS!
To verify the reality of her claims or otherwise, I have devoted time to conduct preliminary investigation about the issue in question after which I got to realise that not only is her teacher and the school were into such unlawful business as independent findings further revealed many others within the community and beyond who have keenly been extorting their pupils in the name of crafts.
This is very pitiful for the Nigeria’s crawling education environment which has amongst other things, apparently been suffering from the defects of sex-for-grades in most of the tertiary institutions and with the unfolding of events and the development that transpired from the primitive level, the results if controllable measures are not taken, is going to be excessively terrible to bear with. God forbid bad thing and save Nigeria’s education environment from falling into a state of disdain.
Yusuf Mairiga Shekarau,
Yelwa, Plateau state
[email protected]
