True democracy stands for
freedom from oppression and subjection. But freedom comes with a price;
even the Holy Bible agrees that the price for freedom is knowledge.
There is a major link between education and its influence on
democracy, and that link becomes easier to identify when we essentially
bring to mind that democracy is government of the people by the people
for the people. Going by this popularly known definition of democracy,
it implies that true democracy revolves round the people, and the height
of citizen’s involvement will to a great extent determine what the
people make out of it.
Over time, critical studies has revealed that strong and stable
democracies over the world are countries given to education, as there
are no countries with poor level of education or educational system that
have managed or sustained to be democratic for a long period of time.
On the other hand, looking through a list of developed nations with
stable democracy, one would easily point out that these nations have a
high level of educational system that have assisted them in maintaining a
successful and well established democracy. It was Thomas Jefferson who
said that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of
civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
True democracy stands for freedom from oppression and subjection. But
freedom comes with a price; even the Holy Bible agrees that the price
for freedom is knowledge. For it says in one of its books that “you
shall know the truth and the knowledge of the truth shall set you free”
So that settles it that democracy which clamours for freedom cannot
flourish without education.
Education enriches one basically with the ability to read and write,
which enables people to communicate well and work collaboratively with
others. The ability of a people to work together helps a lot in
defending democracy. The ability and role of an uneducated man with
limited capacity to process information is absolutely incomparable to
that of a learned individual in a democratic set up. It’s evidently
clear that democracy cannot succeed in an environment dominated by
ignorance.
I think many African leaders claiming to be practising democracy are
aware of the connecting tie between education and democracy, and it
won’t be out of place to say that they are deliberately impoverishing
education system for their own selfish interest so ignorance can reign
Nigeria for instance still wallows in an educational structure that
equips its youth for a world that practically doesn’t exist anymore.
Beside that the present system is loudly inadequate, shallow and
archaic, yet it can’t even be trusted to run optimally at its present
inadequate and mediocre level. For over two months now the Academic
Staff Union of Polytechnics have been on strike for over two months and
the Federal Government is less concerned about such a nasty development.
Well, it’s not the first of its kind, there are records of strikes that
lasted well over a whole semester and even close to an entire academic
section while I was in school. And same goes for secondary schools as
well. This shows that the Nigerian government hasn’t realized that the
country’s development can only spring up, first, by paying attention to
the development of its human capital through an improved educational
system.
Our falling educational system should be restructured such that it
helps the youth to build self-reliance, hence turning them into idea
generators who finish school not as “half baked” like employers tend to
call fresh graduates; but individual who can come up with genuine ideas
to tackle the challenges of the nation and that of the African
continent.
It’s quite amazing and appalling that our educational system has no
regard or concern about instilling the habits of citizenship amongst its
youths through civic education and the teaching of history. It’s
amazing that as a nation we collectively assume that we can achieve
lofty height without the knowledge and consciousness of our history. We
forget that a nation without history, without collective memory is a
country without a future! To stabilize our fragile democracy, we need a
critical mass of the population to be active citizens. That’s a vital
way to ensure that the government heed to the voice of the people.
Therefore, citizens have to be well informed to be engaged in the
polity, to this end, it’s imperative that we begin to advocate that
civic education be included in the Nigerian education curriculum at all
levels. This essentially would go a long way in ensuring that the youths
acquire the basic knowledge and ideals to become active citizens in
order to strengthen the survival of our democracy.
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