School children
They have become very sophisticated. The older generation can't easily understand them. I must say, they are very intelligent and talented and can do so many things in different ways. I am talking about the current generation!
We have not been able to appreciate and categorize their abilities but continue to force them to learn what may contribute less to their interest and abilities.
They feel their intelligence are under utilised or redundant and they use same on things that are probably immoral or unethical.
We don't need to clip the wings of the current generations. More opportunities should be available for them to explore and their abilities, interest and intelligence categorized and harnessed for national development.
We are getting to an era, whether we like it or not that paper exams alone will prove ineffective in assessing abilities and intelligence of our younger generation.
We have killed so many talents by just thinking that everybody should do well in paper examination. That is far becoming unrealistic especially when we impose so many subjects on different students with different abilities and talents.
Through the current system, intelligent and talented young ones are frustrated. How can a student score Bs in all his subjects except English, where he scores E8 and for which reason, has his education truncated? It is absurdity to allow such students get frustrated for failing just one subject which may not be his interest area or which may not play a significant role in his carrier.
I think we can introduce what we call "ability diagnosis" in the early stage of our educational system. That system should be a therapic approach handled by a team psychologists who can use series of psychological approaches/tools to categorize students base on abilities, interest and talents. The approach can, in the future, produce a more sophisticated human resource hub for this country with unique abilities.
Intelligence should not be measured on how proficient some one speaks a foreign language or how well one passes examination when indeed, the integrity and credibility of examinations is being compromised!
We are confronted with a emerging change of behavior of our current generation arising from technological advancement and globalisation. We must think along those lines or leave a century long behind technology. The rapidity in the change process needs a certain radical, pragmatic and adaptive approach. Our goals as a nation may be fixed beyond a century but any strategy that has a lifespan of more than 15 years in a technological driven global village is an obsolete and "useless" strategy.
In our African context, I see that gap! Investing massively into research will be a panacea to handling the situation and providing the benchmarks of taking decisions that handle our contemporary predicaments. The situations are becoming complex day by day. We must chase this modernity or leave our next generation a helpless situation.
A thought from the street.
Denis Andaban
The village boy from DBI