The hard work which Professor Tahir Mamman didn’t want to do is thinking things through thoroughly before implementation. This would involve him seeing to it that the six-year primary school starting age which the 6-3-3-4 education system envisages is strictly enforced with appropriate sanction for any violations. With this done, the entrants to the first three years of secondary school education should not be ready until they are at least 12 years old.
By the time they are 15, they should be ready for the so-called Junior WAEC, after which they transit to the senior secondary school level. At this point, an average candidate should be 16 years old and by the time this stage of their education ends such a candidate would be 18. Of course Prof. Mamman, in the wake of his earlier announcement of 18 years as the admission age limit for university education, has since clarified that they (I guess that means the ministry he heads) never set 18 as the qualifying age for sitting the School Certificate in Education.
What does this mean really? That anyone less than 18 can sit the exam? This was always the case and we all know that much older candidates write the exam as private candidates. We will assume that Prof. Mamman’s concern is not with private candidates but students who went through the entire rung of primary and secondary level education. Such candidates will by the calculation we’ve been following be eligible for university admission at 18. For this to happen, nobody should have dashed through the pre-nursery system which they begin barely before they are one. Many parents are hooked on the rat race of getting their children and wards through the education system in a manner that suggests they would be happy to see them past the entire primary school system, with its earlier pre-school stages of playgroup, nursery and so on, faster than it takes them to conceive them.
The primary goal is to have the bragging right to say that their children finished primary, secondary or university education at the youngest age possible, and not necessarily because such children exhibit exceptional cognitive or intellectual skills. I know a few parents whose children demonstrate less than average abilities yet they are stampeded through the system without regard to their limitations. Where such children fail to meet up, mostly because of poor academic performance, they are moved from one pliant school that is inclined to offer admission in exchange for money, to another.
Things are this bad and it explains the phenomenon of special education centres where academically-deficient students engage in examination malpractices of all kinds with the active cooperation of their parents. They leave secondary school with some of the best grades and appear to be on stellar academic flights only to come down crashing like a bird shot down in mid-flight, when they get to the university. Eduation is nothing to be trifled with and policy makers must be conscious of the enormity of the responsibility they bear on behalf of society. Enough gestation period should be left for policies to be conceived, mature and executed. There is nothing to be in a hurry for about this.
When this is done, there will be no need to want to start climbing a tree from the topmost branch- as in the case in question, start the implementation of policies from their termination point. This was what Prof. Mamman sought to do when he suddenly set about implementing the university admission age limit at 18 and the commencement date for it at September/October 2024 without taking into play the years already spent by the pre-18 secondary school graduate in the race of life to graduate from university at 18.
Prof. Mamman may genuinely want to put an end to the bastardisation of the education system but his seems more like a political solution to largely social problem. He would rather use the levers of political power to smash the vanity of overtly ambitious students and their parents. A more sinister reading of the situation is that selective implementation of policies like this is done to settle scores between the educationally-advanced South and the North that is struggling to keep pace with it, burdened by its tens of millions of out-of-school children.
Whatever are the reasons for this policy the fact remains that it was poorly conceived and its operationalisation would have been more poorly done given the limited time available for conception and execution. More time is needed for things to shape out and for the policy to be properly executed to the advantage of all.
That being said, the point has to be repeated that there is nothing inherently bad about a pre-18 year old going to university. It’s a matter of ability and some students can cope adequately. The thing is to know who those are that meet the cut based on established scientific facts which many parents don’t care about.
Beyond this, however, emotional preparedness is important. Some candidates possess the intellectual power without commensurate emotional intelligence or readiness. While they may be intellectually sound, they are at heart babies.
The university is not a place to raise children not properly cared for or prepared for adult existence. Some parents, indeed, imagine it’s the duty of lecturers and other university staff to help raise their immature children. This is pure abdication of responsibility, especially where there is clear evidence of emotional, physical and mental abuse following too early exposure to formal education.
Policies and policy makers are far more concerned with the average or normal performer, not the exceptional person who can always take care of themselves where they are spotted and guided based on objective standard. It is not for such candidates that the 18-year admission age limit is meant. The problem with us, however, is that most parents imagine their children to be geniuses. They cannot come to terms with the unvarnished truth of their children’s natural limitations and make dangerous effort to cover them with the inevitable outcome of ruining them.
Concluded
