By Yakubu Anas
Our education system is broken not because we lack intelligence, but because it is built on the wrong foundation. Until we correct the structure, we will keep producing frustration instead of graduates.
1. A Static Curriculum That Trains for Jobs That Do not Exist
At every level — from early childhood to university — our curriculum has one dominant goal: to produce manpower for white-collar employment. Teachers and students are therefore conditioned to chase numerical grades, not competencies.
This grade-obsession directly fuels educational corruption: examination malpractice, payment for marks, and bribery for admission. All of it thrives because the system rewards scores, not skills.
Meanwhile, our economy is full of real opportunities in agriculture, trade, manufacturing, digital services, and the green economy. Yet our schools are not designed to produce graduates who can seize them. The result is mass youth unemployment, frustration, and for the most vulnerable, a drift into drugs, violence, and crime.
2. An Imported Model That Ignores Our Context
Education should be built on society’s actual needs. Ours is built on the guidance of international partners who see our problems but do not understand their roots. Because they diagnose from a distance, their solutions fit their background, not ours.
Even our “new” approaches are not indigenous. Life skills and critical, creative, and communicative thinking are often lifted from Western frameworks with little regard for our culture or faith. Our cultural worldview is treated as an obstacle, and the influence of Islam on thought and conduct is dismissed as antagonistic rather than engaged as an asset.
The same applies to vocational training. The focus is on computers, Artificial Intelligence, solar and green energy, modern culinary arts, fashion, and tailoring. These are valuable, but when we neglect local vocations — leatherwork, metalwork, irrigation farming, traditional textiles, Ajami publishing — we abandon the rural majority and the underprivileged.
Worse, when vocational programs require tools and inputs that beneficiaries cannot afford, graduates cannot sell, businesses collapse, and role models disappear.
3. Erasing Indigenous Literacy and Morality
We define illiteracy only as the inability to read and write in Latin script. In doing so, we degrade _Hausa Ajami_, the literacy tradition that preceded colonial rule and still anchors Tsangaya and Almajiri schools across Northern Nigeria. Because the system refuses to recognize what our communities already value, many continue to resist Western schooling. That rejection is why Almajiri and Tsangaya education remain neglected, and why government struggles to regulate it.
The moral cost is just as high. When morality is framed as intimidation, rudeness and irresponsibility fill the vacuum. When respect for elders is labeled as slavery, respect for constituted authority becomes shameful. And when education is reduced to grades and certificates, skills are pushed aside and genuine development becomes impossible.
4. Decisions Made Without Practitioners
Finally, those who decide what is taught at basic and secondary levels have often never taught there. Learners and parents are excluded from the conversation. It is no surprise, then, that our schools keep producing what society neither needs nor can absorb.
The Way Forward
We must redesign education around three pillars: 1) skills over scores, 2) local opportunity over imported templates, and 3) culture and faith as resources, not roadblocks. Only then will education stop alienating our youth and start equipping them to build the Nigeria they live in.
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