Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, has said the study of Nigeria’s History has been restored to the country’s educational curriculum.
Speaking during an Arise TV interview, monitored by MyNigeria, Alausa dismissed claims that the President Bola Tinubu administration erased History studies from schools.
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He said, “History wasn’t banned by this government. It was banned about 13 years ago. If you look at it now, our kids are so delayed within the history of this country. I don’t know who in their mind banned history. That’s why this president mandated us to do a pure curriculum review; Nigeria needs history back as part of our curriculum. We’ve reinstituted it; we’ve started it. So, Nigerian history is back. We did not ban it. We felt it was wrong and we moved swiftly to bring Nigerian history back.”
Nursery school graduation ceremony is extortion
Alausa then expressed displeasure at the new trend, which sees schools throw graduation ceremonies for nursery school pupils.
“Now, let me talk about the Nursery school graduation. It might be funny for you, but it is sheer extortion of parents. It’s not acceptable. Why would you do graduation for nursery one and nursery two children? We want to encourage these kids, but let’s give them proper milestones,” he said.
The minister then advised that graduation ceremonies should be held for those who have completed primary, secondary, and university education.
He further stated, “Part of the extortion that we have stopped is… I don’t even know how this happened… while I was growing, I used my sister’s textbooks. Our parents will tell us, ‘Keep that book very well, your younger brother or sister will use it’. It’s a way to save costs. Now, they’ve manipulated the entire process. Another way to extort students – you put textbooks as part of workbooks. The students write on those books, and they become useless. Next term, you tell parents to buy another book.
“Also, what publishers were doing was that they were not even making any content change. It might just be pagination or margination or just a change of the cover, then say, ‘come and buy another textbook’. We will not allow Nigerian parents to be extorted.
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That’s bad and that’s why we moved to stop that. Now, we say workbook must be completely separated from the core textbook itself. We also told NERC that unless there is a global change in any form of education, textbooks must be kept and there should not be any upgrade in three years.”