A HEALTHY SYSTEM

School is meant to be tough, it is meant to bring out the best in you, it is not meant to pamper you but prepare you for the real world you are going into. This is why one of the big lessons it teaches is that actions have consequences and that you need to be ready to go the extra mile for you to achieve your goals in life. But if the process becomes life threatening, then there is something wrong with the system and that is how it is for a good part of the educational system in Nigeria especially for those who are barely managing to see themselves through school. Why give students 12 courses to study in a semester if you are not going to give them time to learn those courses. A lot of the time, they may just learn two or three out of all of them and end up looking for ways to just pass the exams. This is one of the thighs that discourages a lot of students from actually putting in the work.

Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash

I remember back in school, I offered a lot of courses, but learned very few, a lot of the time the lectures do not even come to class, yet they sell textbooks, make us pay for practicals we will never do, and give us term papers that will require a lot of money and we will still need to sit for exams and try to pass them. At one point it was very frustrating and no matter how much we tried to talk about it in the student congress it was always sweat under the carpet. It did however give us (the students) an idea about the real world. We got the idea that we can not trust the system and thus we must try every day to survive it. Reading isn’t the goal, knowing what you are learning isn’t the goal, passing exams is the major goal.

Every student deserves a healthy system, every student deserves to learn and understand. But because the country’s system is broken, it is hard to really learn. Our educational system is merely a reflection of our country's system. I have seen a lot of students who say when they become lecturers they will treat their students worse than how they have been treated. A lot of our lecturers said to us that No one would be getting an A in their course because their own lecturers never gave them one which is one of the most heartbreaking things a student can ever face and which is one of the reasons students stop trying. I mean it is only logical to pay your way through instead of trying to work for it. No matter how we look at it, students who become victims develop a tough skin and become the predators themselves making their cycle go on and on. If the system of corruption and negligence can be changed in the country, it would affect the educational system and give students who work hard a fair advantage in the system because it will show that if they work hard in the real world, they will have a chance.

THIS IS MY RESPONSE TO HIVE LEARNER'S PROMPT FOR WEEK 207 EPISODE 3