Olusola Akinbinu, and education advocate and socio-political commentator, has canvassed restructuring of Africa’s educational system in the direction of counseling, coaching and mentoring which will give birth to products who are critical thinkers.
Mr. Akinbinu who made the suggestion while speaking on the topic, Creating a Nexus between Education and Personal Innate Ability at the convocation ceremony of Esep-Le Berger University, Cotonou, Benin-Republic in October 15, 2016 said this is will help create enormous wealth, in Africa
He expressed regret that education in Africa is more of condemnation and coercion instead of be used being used to enhance and sharpen innate abilities, breaking all forms of barriers.
”Education is to foster the impact of man upon nature around him, aid him to comprehend and transform it to something of better value and use. Anything short of that, is actually not education, some may call it ‘ritual schooling’,” the Akure based advocate said.
“The rituals of curriculum we have in our schools today (however necessary), are not the education, but a demonstration of problems solved by others in history, hence we will be compounding the problems already caused by us ( as a society), if we continue to compel students to memorize and replicate literature basically for examination purposes.
“We must change this, with a creative and inclusive philosophical approach. Our target should be to use the curriculum we had, as a background to bring out new thoughts from them, taking into consideration the realities of today and an anticipation of a more convenient future,” he said in his speech.
Akinbinu noted that the difference between poor and wealthy nations is the attention and commitment to knowledge acquisition and use.
“The difference between ‘wealthy nations’ and ‘poor nations’ in the world today, is not actually the amount of money in economic circulation, but the knowledge produced and used in them,” he said.
”This is what they do in Europe and many Northern American Universities. In result, what we find out in the market, is that we keep spending for them in buying our daily needs and ironically, still beg them to come and invest among us, simply because we quite jettison knowledge and scientific methods to human social interactions but they prioritize that.”
The social affairs commentator stressed that the knowledge economy addresses how education and knowledge generally called ‘human capital’ can serve as a productive asset and yield profits for the individual, the business and the economy.
