The Education Policy of a country may be defined as the attitude of the government of that country towards the means of the people’s livelihood and standard of living, and the best ways of achieving them. Fundamentally, an education policy should be utilitarian. It should reflect the needs and aspirations of the nation. For an education to be sensible, it must fulfil the aims of and principles of true education in relation to the society for which it is formulated.

Without suggesting rigid lines of complete and generous education: – PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES – which comprise care of body and skills, SPIRITUAL ACTIVITIES which consist of Intellectual, Moral Aesthetic and Religious enrichments, no worthy educational effort will sacrifice the one on the altar of the other without endangering society. We may remind ourselves of the fundamental proposition of Idealism in education, that the mental or spiritual is more real or at least more important than the material. Educational philosophers from Socrates in Jean-Jacques Rousseau all realized that education must teach a child about the structure of the society and where he fits into it. There must also be moral training the basis for the most important aspect of all education – character training.

A sound education policy must of necessity determine and have in view the end products of its application. Thus it should produce men and women who can take their places in society and make some contributions to it; complete personalities and thinking human beings with moral courage to stand by their beliefs; with a sense of the true values of life; people well trained to do the work they are most fitted for, so that they have a purpose in life; people with a sense of appreciation of the finer things of life, so that they may also know how to enjoy their leisure; in fact, people who have been led along the right path to intellectual curiosity so that they realize that when they take their place in society they are only just beginning to learn and that there is still a whole wealth of knowledge for an alert and inquiring mind, that has been trained to realize its potentialities to the full.

For such an almost perfect person to be a product of an education system, there must be the right kind of advice to and direction for those who have a hand in policy making. And of course such expert advice and direction will depend on the kind of education, the ideas and ideals of those who advise and direct. Such guidance must realize the need for avoiding waste in education policy. The right kind of education system should discover and help the pupil to discover the direction in which his or her talents lie by the time he or she has arrived at the end of a primary school life. Such a system should make sure that the very best training possible is available in whatever direction is chosen. It is a defective education policy where there is, say, a need for engineers and we say: “you, you and you must study to be engineers” without respect for their natural bents. It is a waste of  time, effort and money to train some one in a field in which he is not interested simply because there happens to be shortage in one particular trade or profession and because the student can only obtain the government scholarship. If he chooses one of these. A really effective education system must cater for all aspects, with art, trade, technical and commercial schools as well as the normal primary and secondary schools. It is not always advantageous for an education system to lead to specialization too early in a young parent’s life. In Britain today, educationists are very worried about this problem of too early specialization in scientific and technical fields. Perhaps it might be wiser for every nation to follow the French system and make all science students do at least two years of classics as well as their science course and vice-versa. Happily enough the University of Nigeria is doing this.

A sound education policy should have teachers who have had special training in vocational guidance and it is their job to know all the boys and girls who are about to leave school and to discuss with them and their parents in the light of their abilities, desires and scholastic attainments, the best course of further study to follow and advice and arrange accordingly.

Where a community is in an advanced stage of civilization and achievement, its education policy must distinguish the value of more leisure; towards the acquisition of the ornamental rather than the useful. But when the community is a primitive one the education system should be hardy, and productively utilitarian. The aim then must not be to secure a position of authority which exempts from manual work but to train the community in the habit of industry and piety. In the words of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe – “Higher education in this country should not be an easy passport to authority without apprenticeship”. In brief an education policy must distinguish between knowledge of intrinsic value: knowledge of quasi-intrinsic value and knowledge of conventional value. In Nigeria for instance, agriculture and industry, technical and commercial education, should be given pride of place now because they are capable of producing the wealth that will provide all other types of education.

No education policy is worthy of the name without a discipline of body and mind. Britain’s industrial revolution has been described as the triumph of self-discipline. The British education system in the second half of the eighteenth century has been criticized because of its loose discipline. When students and university undergraduates rioted and racketed at will without any authority to discipline them. This seems, not seems, but is the present plague throughout Europe, to the extent that in August, 1959 the UNESCO got it passed that corporal punishment should be introduced in school. And even more recently, the Republic of Liberia re-introduced by legislation the use of corporal punishment in its schools because it discovered that moral standards were falling and that the youth in general were becoming incorrigible.

In the light of this we have got a peg on which to hang the Education Policies in Nigeria.

This article by Mr. P.O. Iheakaram, now a  rtd Professor, was first published in The Leader of Saturday July 18, 1964, He was then a  Tutor at Fatima Teacher’s  College (FTC) Nsu.

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