THE CHURCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF SECONDARY EDUCATION IN NKANU EAST LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF ENUGU STATE
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
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1 Background to the Study
Education is a vehicle that drives every society towards development and healthy living especially in the 21st century. Education is the process through which a student acquires knowledge, skills, and concepts and modifies their behavior. The instructor introduces the student to the ideas of a certain subject. The practical tool for creating a cultural identity and for establishing and distributing a suitable value system to all citizens is education.The importance of education in the enhancement of moral, socia1, political and cultural empowerment of the Nigerian Child cannot be overemphasized (Usoro, 2001).
Education, as they say, “is light,” and a failure to live and work in this light could cause a significant setback for her nation since its residents’ lack of education could impede the expansion of its economy. A vital element of national growth is education. Any country’s degree of political, technological, and economic advancement is intimately correlated with the quality of its educational system. It is a common belief that no country can advance past its current state of educational progress.
The early western missionaries to Nigeria attempted to build the Christian faith in the country on the category of “Church-State relationship.” The kings were targeted for conversion and the churches and schools were built around the palaces of the converted kings. The missionaries first settled in the southern parts of Nigeria and then spread into the hinterland and gradually northwards. The dual responsibility of bringing to the Christian religion and Western education fell upon the Christian missionaries from Europe, America and Sierra Leone (Ajayi, p.15).
The advancement of education in Nigeria has been greatly influenced by the church. In Nigeria, the first Western-style schools were founded in the 19th century by missionaries, most of whom were from America and Europe. These establishments functioned as hubs for evangelism and conversion in addition to offering formal education. Because Western education offered greater professional options and social mobility, many Nigerians were drawn to it. Therefore, the church’s involvement in education aided in Nigeria’s economic growth, social transformation, and increase in the literacy rate. Millions of Nigerians still receive their education from churches, which are still involved in many of the country’s secondary schools and universities.
The arrival church in Nigeria has been the most rapidly growing movement in the country. The early missionaries in the Southern and Northern Nigeria discovered that they would not successfully carryout their work on Christian evangelism without the help of western type of education. So, wherever the missionaries opened a mission, that centre or house was used both as school and as a church.
In other to carryout effective work on Christian evangelism, the missionaries established and monopolized education in Nigeria (Ajayi, p.65). Western education was introduced to Nigeria by the Christian missionaries in the 19th century. It was a strategy adopted by the early missionaries to get converts into Christianity. This educational system was monopolized by Christian missionaries in the early years.
The British brought Western education to a minority ethnic groups that is the middle belt region of Nigeria. Such ethnic groups like TIV, Igbirra, Joma, Igala, Sura, Jukun, Birom, Bachama, Angas, Gwan, and others (Ozigi and Ocho, p.3). These ethnic groups incidentally did not politically belong to the North. They were thus to a large extent ignored as “people in no man’s land” these ethnics groups were however, uplifted because of their literary advantage over the rest of the north. These mission educated citizens took over many government positions as the British retreated and created job opportunities for Nigerians. Were it was accepted in the north, Western education brought about several positive changes.
Stated differently, a country’s total development is directly impacted by the quality of its educational system, which in turn defines the country’s degree of human capital.By widening the beneficiaries’ perspective, education fosters an environment that makes it possible for them to take advantage of all the options life has to offer.Most people agree that education is essential to a country’s progress. Socioeconomic growth, productivity, higher individual incomes, and a decrease in income inequality all depend on more people having access to high-quality education (Republic of Nigeria, 2007).
Through a number of policy frameworks, the Nigerian government has emphasized the value of education in its socioeconomic development initiatives ever since gaining political independence. Owing to its importance, it has increased educational access over time by founding additional public schools around the nation. Due to this quick growth, there were 17,394 primary schools in 2006, housing 7,394,763 students, compared to the original 6,058 primary schools in 1963, which had 891,552 students enrolled (Ibid, 2007).
Education is believed to help produce reasonable, sensible, refined and responsible being or a group of people either for an individual or group development of either his/her self or the society. All over the world, education has been discovered and accepted as the bedrock of all-round developments of both human beings and their society. United Nations Organization emphasizes the need to train every child in the world. Africa, being one of the seventh continents in the world is trying her best despite the facts that she has a lot of challenges everywhere.
A school system is an establishment including the plant and equipment for providing education from kindergarten through higher institution (NOUN, p.15). The primary goal of every educational system is to provide the society with the requisite manpower for development and to enhance quality of the living conditions of their products.
1.2 Statement of the problem
Because of the critical role of education in national development, governments make huge budgetary allocation to the section in order to build and maintain high quality system of education that will ensure that the needs of the citizens and the states are met. In a country like Nigeria for example where there are over 170 million inhabitants, it has been observed that in some areas like in Enugu State, some people are still far from being educated which is not in the best interest of the country if it must transit into a developed society.
The Nigerian government, over the years, has invested in education. It does, however, appear that the standard of education in Nigeria is fast depreciating. This is seen in the rate of unemployable graduates that are produced from our higher institution. The ugly trend of examination malpractices in both the basic, secondary and tertiary levels of education are all manifestations of decline in the education sector. Furthermore, moral decadence and other social vices such as cultism and drug abuse among young people are evidences of decay and decline in the quality of Nigeria’s education system.
Efforts to curb this decline in quality education in the country seem not to have materialized into lasting solution. Stakeholders and concerned minds view this trend as worrisome as some products of our universities and other institutions of higher learning find it difficult to defend the certificate they carry: a situation that further casts doubt on the integrity of the nation’s education systems.
Osokoya in his article, “education and National development the Nigerian perspectives”, opines that all schools at various levels are expected to educate future leaders and develop the high level of technical capacities needed for economic growth and development (Osokoya, p.21).Even when the government took over the responsibility of the education of her citizens from the early church, the Christendom has not relented in the establishment of schools in Nigeria. Today in the Eastern States, the churches have established a good number of primary and secondary schools in the South-eastern region and extended this endeavour to promote the development of education which will bring about the growth of the Nigerian society.