The one lasting effect of the novel coronavirus that is not as reported as its more proximate effect on people’s health and the economy , is its effect on education. Sure, it has led to the closing of most schools. And anecdotal evidence suggests that private school teachers have been the hardest hit of our white collar workforce – as some school proprietors unsure of where the next tranche of school fees will come from, have stopped paying their salaries.
The burden, expectedly falls on the fabled “poor and the vulnerable” segments of society. And this is not just because they have been particularly poorly served by attempts to move instruction online. In fact, except for the ranks of the upper middle class and the more affluent classes above it, very few Nigerian families can afford the infrastructure necessary to have had their children or wards attend even the most rudimentary online classes at the height of the pandemic.
These were the disadvantages most of our kids carried into the recently concluded examinations conducted by the West African Examinations Council . It was also akin to the burden they had borne earlier with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board’s computer-based tests – to manipulate personal computers for the first time in the tense conditions of this life-changing examinations. The handicap of our poor and vulnerable children did not end with both these examinations, unfortunately.
One objector to my plaint asked what a poor and vulnerable child would want with a private Nigerian university in the first place. Their fees are a pretty high hurdle to begin with. In fact, I was reminded that this is the reason why we have a plenitude of public tertiary institutions. Which is okay, until you realise that the JAMB cut-off mark for admission is higher in our public schools than it is in the private schools. There is a narrow context in which this makes sense.
But these disadvantages the children of the poor in very unfair ways. Too poor to have taken the online classes which some secondary schools used to keep their students honed during the lockdown. Too poor therefore to attend private universities. But because they were not in school during the lockdown, their chances of scoring high enough to make the grade for admission into public universities remain slim.