NIGERIAN CHILDREN NEED SCIENCE EDUCATION,
NOT RELIGIOUS INDOCTRINATION
by Dr. James C. Agazie, EdD
Nigeria
needs to have education that would provide employment for the young in addition
to food, roads, light, and water. The learning of scientific knowledge is what Nigeria
is in dire need of. Learning is defined as a relatively permanent change in
behavior which results from training or experience. More specifically,
education is the foremost benefit a nation like Nigeria can confer or bestow upon
its citizens.
Gone
are the days when education was the exclusive privilege reserved for the
privileged few. Today, education is a necessity for the survival of citizens and
continued existence of the nation. To the extent that Nigeria fails to edify
its people, the country is at the bottom of the list of countries known to make
the least difference in the lives of the ordinary citizen. Life in Nigeria, as
in many other African countries, is fraught, burdened or weighed down with
health and nutritional deficiencies. Science, mathematics, engineering, and
technology permeate nearly the entire facet of modern life and hold the key to
solving many of a nation’s most pressing current and future challenges.
Words
used to describe Nigeria’s lack of meaningful science education system include jungle-like,
incompetent, inexpert, clumsy, ham-fisted, useless, hopeless, bungling, and
heavy-handed. Factors related to Nigeria’s poor science education include
frequent power failures, impassable roads, and incessant mosquito bites causing
endemic malaria. Thousands of Nigerian women are dying daily during pregnancy
due to complications resulting from unhygienic conditions, inadequate knowledge
about prenatal care, gynecological mishaps, and inappropriate medications. Have you ever called Nigeria for a week or so
and could not talk with your folks because there was no internet service and no
light to charge the battery?
When
will Nigerian Government see to it to encourage our women to deliver their
babies locally at a fraction of what it would cost to fly to the United States
or London, in addition to fees for the hospital bed, meals, gynecologist and
obstetrician? The lack of science education is responsible
for inadequate healthcare, housing, and food for a population of over 170
million people. If you don’t know about the millions of dollars our Nigerian
government officials spend on flying overseas for medical treatments that could
easily be dealt locally, you’ve not been following the debates on the topic.
Do
not be shocked to know that foreign hospitals to which your politicians fly to
be treated and die at, are busily harvesting body organs of our people
including hearts, livers, pancreases, and placentas of women. Are they
harvesting the ding-dong (wealthy long penises) for which our politicians are
especially popular? We need to revive science teaching and applications as a
matter of top priority for continued existence of our democracy.
Nigeria
needs to expand the teaching of science at all levels. Science education has to
do with sharing science content and process with persons considered part of the
scientific community, including children, college students, market women, and
adult men within the general public.
Science
education should be such that it is relevant to the life of the woman who cooks
with a kerosene cooker in a poorly ventilated village kitchen, to the life of
the farmer who plants the same crop on the same garden year after year without
fertilizers and without crop rotation. Science subjects in Nigeria will include but
are not limited to physical science, life science, earth science, and space
science. Science education will assist
the woman frying akara balls near open fetid sewer drains/ gutters, while
customers buy akara balls wrapped in newspapers that has been printed with
poisonous ink.
Dear readers, Nigeria needs A SCIENTIFIC
EDUCATION to exploit our huge resources and feed our people, and in the
process, acquire useful scientific knowledge. Let us kick out predatory leeches
such as the Chinese, Indians, Britons and Americans who steal our resources and
render nothing in return. Nigeria has huge deposits of tantalite a
valuable substance for laboratory equipment and a substitute for platinum, but its main use today is in tantalum capacitors in electronic equipment such as mobile phones, DVD
players, video game systems and computers. Nigeria’s
natural resources include oil, natural gas, petroleum, tin, iron ore,
coal, limestone, niobium, lead, zinc and arable land. Oil and natural gas
accounted for 37 percent of the country's GDP in 2006 (most recent stats).Where
does the 63% come from? Agriculture, fishing and forestry also contribute
significantly to the country's GDP.
Dear readers, most of the things Nigeria needs now are in
abundance but haven’t yet been discovered, or are in low precedence on the
nation’s agenda of essential things to do, or are considered of such low
priority that they must wait until some other more pressing needs are met. And
there are services Nigeria hardly has, and if she does have them they are of
the poorest quality or of insufficient quantity.
With
a daily wage of 1 dollar (N365), the majority of Nigerians live below the world
poverty line because Nigerian lacks scientific education. Let’s repeat this
statement for emphasis. Our poverty is due to lack of interest and proficiency
in scientific education. What Nigerian
needs are already there and waiting to be discovered and exploited. With a daily wage of $1.00 (N350), the
majority of Nigerians live below world’s poverty line because they lack the
education needed to insure that the nation does not continue to sit on a gold
mine that has not yet been mined. And if Nigeria realizes what a gold mine she
sits on, the citizens ought to be given the incentive to explore and excavate.
Nigeria
does not need to force-feed our children with morsels of undigested Christian
and Moslem religion. One of the most
frequently paraphrased statements of German economist Karl Marx is “Die Religion….ist das Opium des Valkes” ( religion
is the opiate of the masses). Religion
has done grave injustice to Africa, especially to Nigerians. Both Islam and
Christianity have been undeniably exploitative of black people as a whole. What do
religion, and addictive drugs (such as
cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol) have in
common? They both provide tranquilizing relief for the masses of the people
overburdened by inordinate poverty and perpetual servitude. Around the necks of non-scientific Nigerians
are fastened black collars of servitude such as we keep on dogs.
Religion represents the impotence of the
exploited classes who struggle against the exploiters who teach the exploited
to believe in pie-in-the-sky miracle that ostensibly leads to a better life after
death. Religion teaches beliefs in gods, devils, and miracles, but not in scientific
stuffs. Christianity uses religion to teach that the so-called pagans live their
lives in absolute want and patient submissiveness to higher power. The Christian
exploiters, including the Catholics, Methodists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s
Witnesses, justify their existence as exploiters by extracting trillions of
dollars from ignorant believers.
Nigeria
doesn’t need any more Christianity or Islam because every Nigerian believes in
the existence of God. However, the need for a solution to challenges related to
eating, healing, and living in Nigeria is immediate and cannot wait for
tomorrow. God does not come down from heaven to solve many of the problems
troubling us, such as inability to get along democratically with each other , amiable
communicating without killing ourselves, and failure to explore our environment
in order to improve our standards of
living. Slavery and the human traffic were the hallmarks of conniving
religionists whose contributions to the world are negligible.
Haven’t
Christianity and Islam been conniving, scheming, controlling, devious, or manipulative?
Both religions are enslavers of the
mind, making it possible for well-meaning but gullible Africans to fall into
the entrapping hands of morally bankrupt Europeans who built a fortune through the
Atlantic Slave Trade which lasted for centuries and resulted in the loss of millions of Nigerian lives. Therefore, we must make science
education the cornerstone of our continued existence as a nation LONG LIVE
SCIENTIFIC NIGERIA.
Submitted
by Dr. James C. Agazie
jamesagazies.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment