The other day, I was on
my way home from work which was a late evening, just before nightfall. I looked
to the car on my left and saw about three kids at the backseat struggling to
fight off sleep while the man who obviously was a paid driver given his clothes,
struggled with traffic as he kept trying to maneuver from one lane to the other
in a bid to get ahead the rest of us.
My concern wasn’t about
the driver but was rather 100% geared towards the poor kids who definitely would
have left home in the early hours of the morning courtesy of parents who also
may have rushed off to work as well.
I don’t know how many
of you remember or encountered the days of morning and afternoon school
sessions? The days where parents, especially mothers would PROPERLY get
children ready for school with very good homemade meals as breakfast and not
the junk which many feed kids in a hurry these days.
Back in the day, some
of us went to school in the mornings, got back home before the next group would
be on their way for the afternoon/evening sessions.
Then most of us who
attended the morning sessions were much younger than those who went in the
afternoon and everything was fine until things started changing gradually. And trust,
lunch would also be waiting for you as all of these would have been prepared in
the morning by dearest ‘mummy’ before she left for work. We were well taken
care of and properly raised ‘homed’ kids.
In the parts where I
grew up, you get home from school, rest a bit, do homework, wash your uniform
and then at 4pm when the sun is not so harsh anymore, you are already at the
lesson centre and of course your brain would be willing to assimilate most -I
say most, not all- of the things you are taught. By 6pm, lessons have closed,
then you may or may not hang around to have a little chat with friends for a
while but before 7pm, it is expected that you are already home. And of course,
most parents would be home from work by the time you got home and thereafter
family life is observed. Then we had more intelligent children who didn’t have
to spend so much time on social media learning all sorts including the ‘make
and mar’, yet most of us turned out great in life.
Sadly, today the
reverse is the case. Children stay in school from morning till night, some of
them still require extra extra coaching before many of them can pass simple exams
without any ‘hanky panky’ yet they spend all day at school; doing what? You may be tempted to ask.
It is in this same era
that it has become a norm for parents to not only have to pay for children to
get jobs but would pay for children to be moved from one level of class at
school to the other until he/she gets the degree/certificate and some of such
parents sometimes boast about how much they spend in doing these even when it
is very glaring to all that the child is a ‘nut head’.
So the begging question
now is what went wrong? How did we get here? What do you think happened?
I guess it all started
with the evening lessons and when some teachers realized that they could make
better pay by setting up extra mural classes. I also suppose things started
going wrong when ‘real’ teachers were no longer interested in teaching given
the poor package called ‘salary’ and welfare from both the government and
private schools thereby leaving the very humble profession for those whose main
objective is ‘money making.
We had teachers whose
main intentions were to groom future leaders and well-mannered children. They
taught us not just academically but morally and it was left to you to adhere or
not to adhere.
There was respect both
at school and at home. You would walk on the streets and be greeted by children
of unknown faces just because they acknowledged that you were older just by
merely looking at you, so would pay their respects even if they didn’t know you
from ‘Adam’.
Today, we find so many
private crèches’, primary, secondary schools and even universities with many a
times outrageous fees where all they teach is confusing (British nor American)
phonetics and put in the heads of the children the mentality that their
lives/futures are insured just because they attend such schools.
Private schools spring
up in different corners everyday yet we are having more educated “illiterates”
who even when they get into leadership positions become more corrupt and
insensitive to the plight of the masses than those who they earlier complained
about before they themselves assumed power thereby proving once again that ‘you
can’t give what you don’t have’ as the leaders are truly from amongst the same
crop of masses but unfortunately become ‘mini gods’ once they assume office.
It has also become a
case of many petrol stations in the country yet we are threatened with fuel
scarcity on a daily basis and even more a case of many churches and mosques in
any available space across the country, yet immorality is thriving and getting
on the increase on a daily basis. That is a topic for another day.
How did we get here?
Many people would say
or attribute it to westernization, social media, family values that have gone
sour and more. The list is endless hence could go on and on for a long time.
But then again, have
you played your role as a child, parent, individual, family, teacher,
proprietress, proprietor, organization or government? Be honest.
I have to stop here for
now while you ponder on what has been said so far. Will continue the piece on a
later date as a sequel to this and so it’s ‘bye’ for now.
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