Time, Social Change and Education

Time, Social Change and Education

Onakpoberuo Onoriode Victor

1st January 2020

"#Time is Free Space to make #Choices"

Time is chance, free space or a train of opportunity. It is like empty wagons in the space of eternity; what we put into these empty wagons or free spaces is what moves forward and returns in form of a future. If the wrong choices are made today don't expect the future to be right.

This means the #future is actually being sculpted by the choices we are making today. There was a time it was year 2000 that was projected as the golden year when all our national issues would be resolved; education, health, infrastructure etc. It later shifted to vision 2010 and then 2020 and very recently 2050. The point is this; if we as a people do not sincerely commit ourselves to making the right choices today, all these development goals may never rise above the sheets of paper they are drafted on. We have been moving the goalpost around in hope that we will score, however scoring is not merely about the distance of the goalpost, but rather about the #passion of the team to win, their #skillfulness and #coordination by the coach. If the #vision for #change is only held to passionately by a few individuals, CSOs, FBOs and not by the mass of Nigerians, then that change may not materialize as we are projecting it today. The best that may be realized may be some sensational news items about rights violation here and there.

Social Change is not a wish and may not be realized by sensationalism or propaganda but by the actual change in beliefs and attitude on a person to person bases. For this to happen, our #Teachers would have to be committed to teaching our children today the values that will sustain that anticipated future change. These values should become the talking point in the playground, street corners and these Teachers would have to believe in what they are teaching about the new Nigeria for it to have a #sustainable #National #impact.

The current state of our classrooms nationwide is a visionary scope of how our future will look like if the right choices are not made today. Our plans must be with the consciousness that development is about people and not things; which means we must sincerely take to heart the needs of the 6year old today, secure their intellectual, social development and welfare, so that at the end of the decade when he or she is 16, their patriotic allegiance to Nigeria would have been solidified, because they experienced firsthand how Nigeria worked to preserve their future. According to a survey conducted by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the population of out of school children in Nigeria has risen from 10.5 million to 13.2 million, as at 2018, which is the highest in the world. This population portends great danger for us as a people. We cannot wish this fact away but we can systematically through Education convert this large pool of latent security threat to our advantage as National intellectual asset.

Social change is not in mere rhetorics or fine speeches but in hard choices, prioritizing development in terms of people and it would have to begin from our classrooms. If our Teachers are not teaching change in our classrooms, molding the minds of the next generation of Nigerian leaders, then there is no future change to be expected, for social change truly begins with an educational system driven by passionate and highly motivated Teachers.

God Bless Nigeria

https://www.voanews.com/…/un-nigeria-more-13-million-school…