 You're welcome back. It's still the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. Now we're looking at the situation that our students or our children, our compatriots are facing, especially in the UK, as it is said that tuition now has soared up to 60%. Like the last guest said, it may not be because the tuition has gone up, but because the exchange rate has made it so much so that you're paying up to like 60% more right now. We're being joined by an education researcher, a doctor in education, and he is Dr. Peter Ogudoro. Good morning and welcome to the program, Dr. Ogudoro. Good morning. It's my pleasure to join you on the show. Yes. UK is very far. Let's start from home. Education is becoming very expensive. Even before we go to the UK and talk about the fact that it's 60% now, we're seeing in our tertiary institutions the fees are going high, the charges are going higher, and private institutions, even at the secondary school level, the prices, the fees, everything are going really, really high. What does that say to the education system in Nigeria, first of all, before we go to the UK? Well, this confirms to us that our political leaders don't yet understand the fact that education is indispensable for authority development of our country. They have got no idea regarding the fact that it's the big rock of development that everything starts from the point of education. All countries that have moved forward, with an exception, achieved that first by fixing the education because once you get it attended to, then you would have succeeded in developing the human capital you need to fix your politics, to fix your economy, to fix your health and to attend to every other social ill that is confronting you. That doesn't look like something that our politicians have understood. They keep looking at education as a cost rather than as an investment. And so long as we continue to think about education in the context of cost rather than an investment, we continue to think that citizens should pay for it. So education is a social good and the government should have a responsibility to get the citizens because that's the only way you can achieve loyalty of your citizens. If we have to pay for education the way we have to pay for it now, then our relationship with government becomes, with the state, becomes transactional. And you can't ask me after I have suffered to pay through my nose to get some good education to start using what I have learned to bless my country. That is the way it is. Some of us, yes, we understand no matter what happens, I'm going to continue to bless Nigeria but the average person is not likely to think the way I'm thinking. Okay, but you know, educational system already is suffering and Nigeria also is struggling with funds and all that. So subsidy is being withdrawn from a lot of things and education is affected in one way or the other as well. But the people who are at the helm of affairs, like you said, don't seem to understand that it is so important. But even at that, there's also a possibility that even education is not free like the people usually say all the time that it's not for everybody. University education is not for everybody. Some people should be artists and some people should be these or that. It still places a certain class of people above the rest anytime, any day, because they can afford it. What alternatives do we have as the ordinary Nigerians to make sure that our children get an education that is tolerable enough to get them through life comfortably? No, at the moment the people who are running your country are not offering you alternatives because for you to get an alternative, you first have to go through primary school successfully and then go through high school successfully. As we speak now with the removal of all your subsidy, even parents are not going to be able to put their children through high school successfully because transportation has gone up and that has compelled most schools across the country to also increase their school fee. We know that as we speak now is the 50-50% of Nigerian children are studying in private schools and so those parents are affected, many people have lost their jobs, businesses are struggling and so parents can't procure good quality education for their children and the people who are selling the idea of everybody should go and become a technician. Are they their own children? Are they technicians? Have they provided the technical schools and put in good quality teachers in those places? Have they funded them? Have they put equipment, technology in those places for people to acquire these skills everybody talks about? Why are their own children not going to technical schools? Why are they sending them abroad? I'm preventing ordinary people who are paying through their knowledge to try to send their children abroad from continuing to do so. So I think that what we find in our hands is a solution where the elites, the political elites are making a deliberate effort to ensure that social migration doesn't happen in our country and that's why Nigeria has control to run the way we are running it. So the politicians who were there 50 years ago, their children have taken over and they are preparing their own children and grandchildren to take over from them. So at the end of the day if you have come from a family that has always struggled for good, it's very likely that their own generation will even be worse off economically and socially, which is very unfortunate for us. In similar countries, I just returned from Finland on a recent project and I tell you that they have 100% literacy rate and they give everybody access to the best education possible up to PAD level, you study for free. And in fact if you had the PAD, the government pays the salary and buys you computer and everything and because they want to say thank you to you for finding time to devote a script come part of your life to doing research to improve society. But here we have more people who go to school and so long as we continue to radical education and say it's a scam for that long we will continue to suffer as a people. You can't fix Nigeria's problem merely by getting politicians to come discussing rubbish in Abuja. You have got to train your people to become good quality thinkers. We haven't got good quality thinkers coming under the school system today and so I think that we are in a very dangerous place at the moment. Okay, some basic things. In security, people are talking about the fact that we need state police. In politics, people are talking about the fact that we need independent candidates. In education, would you be advocating homeschooling because we don't have that in Nigeria and I wonder why it would not work in Nigeria or it's not working in Nigeria at that time. Well, I do not know whether you are absolutely right that we don't have homeschooling in Nigeria. It's not that if you at least who understand how to do it are able to do it for your children. I have only two children. At some point I had to withdraw them from the formal school system and at homeschool then both of them are studied in some very good universities abroad now because I was able to educate them myself probably because I have the skills. And some of my friends at my level have been able to do homeschooling for their children even when they can afford it. They have also discovered that most of the schools here even when you call them international schools have not got good quality teachers to deliver the kind of instruction that will make their children globally competitive. So homeschooling is happening. I am living with next to that. I homeschooled my two children through a significant part of their high school and then took them out of this room because what is going on here is not the type of education but more of that is going to happen just a few days. In fact, some of my friends are putting funds together to try to run a campaign that will get more parents to understand what homeschooling is about and how to do it in a way that will not be good yet. So more of that is coming and so be prepared. Many schools are going to suffer because parents are going to withdraw their children from both the public and private school sectors. Not just because they can't afford it but because good quality instruction is not happening in those spaces. But do you think the situation in Nigeria will give a lot of parents that ample opportunity to homeschool their children? Because for you to be able to homeschool your children you will have to have time and time comes with the fact that maybe one of the spouses is comfortable enough to take care of the family while you do the teaching or the small time that you have the work that you do can sustain your family. What about the people who have to wake up four o'clock every morning to go to work and come back at ten just to make ends meet because the situation in the country does not give them the opportunity to stay home. What will they do? If you do the mathematics of homeschooling you discover that it does make sense to do that, especially for children at kindergarten level and those probably at primary school level even at secondary school level I tell you, if you have the right and the right awareness even at high school level it's cheaper to homeschool your children. In my case I didn't do it alone I actually hired teachers and trained them and discovered that the money I spent was significantly lower than the money I would have spent if I had kept them in the public school space or even in the primary school sector. So I think it's because people don't understand how it works because the reason why we spend so much money paying school fees is because we think that our children have to offer 15 soldiers to be useful to be knowledgeable Most of the things that our children have been taught in schools are completely irrelevant nobody needs them in the industry when they finish high school and get into university so with homeschooling what you find is that parents select what their children actually need so out of about, let's say 14 soldiers that they're offering they're regular school you just knock out all the useless things that they're asking your children to cram and reduce everything to about 7 subjects and that saves you money and then makes teaching more engaging makes your children more make your children happier because they'll be learning what they want to learn as we speak today Nigeria is a very difficult situation go and ask the average teenager in a secondary school the teenager will tell you that on a typical day he's not happy waking up to go to school because he's been taught what he knows has become completely irrelevant in the current in the dispensation globally so we're not preparing them for the world of work we're just getting them to cram things and pass exams and is that nobody's going to ask for in the world of work today most employers go and ask HR manager they have stopped asking you for 2, 1 and 1st class they're asking you for skills, they're asking for knowledge they're asking you for analytical capacity they're asking you for the ability to solve practical problems nobody cares anymore about the quality of your grade they are caring more about the kind of problems you can solve and so parents who are in home schooling are selecting the things that employers are asking for eventually and preparing their children for that world of work because we live in a global environment you actually don't need certificate anymore to earn money on the internet there are many sites that are populated by people who have problems people can solve and so once you show up there and you can solve those problems they don't ask you for your degree, they don't ask you for your certificate they are only asking you for proof that you have been able to solve that kind of problem before and so if you're home schooling your children you select the kind of thing that will give them those skills and the knowledge and the international network to be able to get to where they should be and your children will have fun rather than going through motion schooling that doesn't come with education I think it is better for educated parents and other stakeholders in the system to know the difference between schooling and education what we are doing in Nigeria predominantly is schooling our children we are not putting them through education which is very unfortunate for us What do you say about the curriculum now the Nigerian curriculum because I had an experience where I interviewed a school owner and the school owner told me that in her school she had to have the Nigerian curriculum the UK curriculum and the Canadian curriculum she had to have these three because it wasn't enough to just have the Nigerian curriculum so what do you say about the Nigerian curriculum is it good enough for our children even with the best of teachers using that curriculum for them to compete in the global scene Nigeria is missing at all ends from all fronts we are not we are not doing well at all and so what you find is that the curriculum is completely out of reality it has nothing to do with what the world is asking for today the curriculum we are using now is a curriculum that a country like Finland used maybe in the 1950s and so we are minimum 50 years behind time and so we can use that to produce engineers that will give you a stable electricity we can use that to produce doctors who will be able to make accurate diagnosis when you go to hospital so it's an open secret we are not doing well in terms of the curriculum the people even formulated a curriculum have no idea what they should be putting in place in terms of what our children should be put through and then don't also assume that you have great teachers you haven't got great teachers I run a teachers community we have about over half a million there and I tell you that the average teacher still doesn't know what is in the classroom to do ask them for the meaning of learning the average Nigerian teacher can define that really and there is so much focus on the cognitive level of change rather than trying to move children towards getting them to acquire skills have analytical ability have commercial awareness and then learn how to work in teams and become very good communicators all of those things are not being emphasized our curriculum is just big on what to think rather than how to think and so long as you have a curriculum that focuses more on what to think rather than on how to think for that long will you continue to suffer as a country so Nigeria is not progressing towards developing the human capital that will enable you to solve all these economic challenges that are confronting you now as we speak I hope you know that Nigeria's per capita income is below $3,000 a country like Norway has over $80,000 per capita income meaning that what the Norwegian ends in the year Nigeria will spend his entire lifetime he hasn't ended and that's scandalous for us especially in a country where life expectancy is also below 60 years so we are being harassed you know on every front and that's because the politicians are very selfish they are managing to find the money from a public treasury to send their own children abroad and they do not care about the children of the poor who deserve to also achieve social migration, get out of poverty but these people here they are so protective of what they have accomplished for their families and they do not want other people to come to that space where they are and that's something that all of us who don't seem to have the access to political power should begin to think about how we can accomplish you know how we can acquire more political power insist that Nigeria has to become more equitable and run a fair and just system at the moment we don't have that. Okay right now what we really are talking about is the fact that those people who can afford it and have sent their children outside this country and are faced with the fact that the tuition has gone up to 60% maybe not because of the fault of the host country but because of our exchange rate or whatever the reason might be do you see this as reducing the number of people who seek education tourism outside the shores of Nigeria? That's that's that's automatic you don't need a degree from you know Harvard University to understand that we must underscore the fact that UK universities have not suddenly increased school fees so that nobody gets to see I studied in the UK I know how the system was even if school fees are going to be increasing in the UK it doesn't go beyond 5% annually they are they run a sense is you know a much that's exciting that you are running here so what has happened is that the same school fee that you were charged by university has remained you know what they are still asking you to pay but the money you need to move from Nigeria to the UK for you to remain in school has increased you are not at to pay more because of this unification of the black market and the formal CBN rate so that's exactly what has happened and it's automatic if you are not able to you know find that money and get it out of Nigeria into the UK you definitely have to drop out of school many people have already changed their mind because especially if you are doing PID a PID you know for you to enroll in a PID class in the UK university in the UK, tuition fee will be minimum of you know 20,000 pounds and if you convert that to Naira and add the living expenses which will add a minimum of about 10,000 pounds again to it convert all of that to Nair and you discover that you need over 40 million annually to remain in school and so when people do the mathematics of it they ask themselves the question how many years will it take me to recover the cost of my education in any of those countries and then people drop out and those who are at home and they are hoping to they were planning to travel out by next year to go and pursue high education they are dropping that ambition and so we are going to find a sense in the solution where very smart people and they like to go and you know pursue legitimately high good quality education. I am going to stay here and they will create problems for all of us really. You will find people who would ordinarily not think about crime because you have not given them jobs and you are also not permitting them to go abroad to go and get good quality education and come back to serve your country. They are all going to use that you know capacity to think properly and use it to start devising very unproductive and devilish things that can unleash on the rest of us. Which I think the government has ensued this well you don't deal with the free exchange the way you have done with it and then also come back and say you remove subsidy on education which you keep talking about subsidy removal with respect to petroleum. They have also done it for education because we differ from September children are going to pay especially those universities are going to be higher fees that is in fact universities have already announced higher fees for the incoming class starting in September. So on all fronts Nigerians have been tackled and very unfairly. This is somehow to affect change. Change must be done in a way that makes change acceptable makes change bearable makes change easy to implement. But unfortunately the people advising our politicians regarding what they are doing don't even understand what to do especially as in consensual education and I find it very unacceptable. Okay, having said that let's just go straight to the point of how to revamp our educational system. We shouldn't be seeing ASU for instance going on strike all the time asking government to build infrastructure and do XYZ in universities or to even ask for their own pay and all that. But there's a fundamental rot in the system that needs to be corrected. In your own view as a researcher in education what are these fundamental things that need to be put in place? Maybe we take advantage of the fact that some people may not go abroad anymore to study but we need to revamp our educational system so that we can absorb all these people and make our future better because it's the number of people that are educated well not just schooled like you said that will make our country great. So what are these things that we need to do to make our educational system work perfectly for us? Yeah, we need to find the humidity to get all the stakeholders on the table and learn from them. It's a bad idea to think that you can fix Nigeria's education without giving people opportunity to go and study abroad. We don't have enough vampire at the moment to run our high education system really because we need more people who have NPHD from good institutions where they have acquired the skills to do research and also have the international network that will enable them to bring in grants and funds from different parts of the world to do research and then help your system. We don't have enough at the moment for every four spaces we have that should be occupied by PIT PITs in Nigeria in the past you probably don't have even up to two so you are still shut by up to 50% and you can't fix that by looking in words you need to send people abroad as I tell you that's what Indians have done and I was talking about my child, my son yesterday who is moving to a business school in the US and he told me that 20% of his class are coming from India one country is contributing 20% of his class and it's a class in the US and one country they are even contributing more than the home country. Why is India doing that? India recognizes that when you send people abroad they got to get the best of skills and then you make the conditions at home favorable for them to come home and they come home and use what they have learned in America and in Britain and Canada and Germany to improve their country so we need to do that let the people scholarship in America, Canada, Germany societies that truly have better quality education and can give their people the skills to go and acquire those skills, get end masters MPAD and then come back and go back to a band or in the University of Lagos to stay there and then pay them better we need to improve the welfare of teachers across all levels, we need to improve their access to training services and not turning our teachers as I mentioned earlier every Nigerian teacher doesn't have the kind of skills we need to run modern classrooms and so they focus there's too much focus across all levels including in the universities there's too much focus on what to think rather than how to think and so we need to return our teachers and we need money to do that but it's not only money because sometimes you give people who run the system money and they put it in their private pocket the welfare share of the national cake so we need to do that so we need to get a correct philosophy of education what should we be sending our students to school to do are we sending them to school to go and get grades and get certificates or we're sending them to school to go and learn you know acquire the knowledge the skills and the right values to become globally competitive and get involved in solving local problems again you didn't mention earlier that there are many schools now the average private school is big on running you know British curriculum American curriculum you know Canadian curriculum so we are training our children on how to solve problems of the West and not on how to solve the problems of Nigeria and that's very you know problematic it's not going to take you to where you want to be so we also need to look at that work on your curriculum and then return your teachers and fund better if we take only 30% of the money we're saving through removal of OIU subsidy and then dealing with OIU theft if we move 30% when the money we're saving in those areas into education we give everybody free education and also make it more functional deliver high quality education that will make our country find the human capital we need to start you know progressing towards what everybody desires in terms of development so these are very simple things to do but even though they look simple the politicians don't understand them I think that they did help you know from people who have traded these routes before and some of us are happy to help. Okay well that is where we are going to drop it this morning Dr. Peter Ogudoro thank you so much for being a part of our show today we'll still consult you I said where when we're talking education in subsequent editions of the program thank you for being a part of our program today it has been my pleasure joining you. Have a great day. You too that was Dr. Peter Ogudoro education researcher he has a PhD in education talking to us about the educational system our focus was on the fact that in the UK the school fees or the tuition fees have gone up 60% and that is a result of what economic policies we have back here at home and we do hope that things will get better and educational system will get even a lot better well as we wrap up today let's leave you with this your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning that is according to Bill Gates your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning that's how we leave you this morning and we hope that will connect again tomorrow Friday which is a weekend whatever you do stay positive we are going to survive this all together. My name is Nyam Gul Agadje on behalf of the entire crew saying thank you for being there