United Nations flays Nigeria’s education curriculum for lack of standards

The United Nations has faulted Nigeria’s education curriculum for lack of objective values, resulting in the continued production of what it described as clever thieves.

National Executive Project Director, Free United Nations Human Rights Education and Advocacy Training Project, Nigeria, Dr. Ugochuma Perez Ibekamma, made the assertion in Awka, Anambra State.

Ibeakamma said the country’s school curriculum lacked the basic ingredients that would inculcate the right values in pupils and students due to moral decadence in the society.

While identifying a philosophical approach that contends that the right education should be tailored to learn to know, do, live and become, he stated that if objective values were taken away from humanity, the tendency is to reduce man to the animalistic level.

Emphasising the three learning process of what he identified as human rights education, he stated that knowledge and skills help individuals to learn and understand issues of human rights standards and acquiring skills to activate them in real-life situations.

He also said values and attitudes help to develop principles and reinforcement of thoughts that uphold human rights, whereas behaviours serve as a stimulus to actions for the promotion of human rights.

Ibeakamma advocated human rights education and training that promote values, beliefs and attitudes that make it possible for people to value, respect and uphold not only their own rights but also those of others to achieve a just society.

He hinted that if the youths were not brought back to moral values, given the immoral music and social exposures, their behaviours would worsen and increase their resort to social vices like prostitution, nudity and cultism.

“The global body plans to use objective values, moral-oriented radio advocacy, outreach programmes, material and financial incentives to lure and positively impact on members of the society, including the youths whose morals have been devalued through ‘popular culture’,” he stated.

These, he said, would go a long way in achieving a reversal from popular culture to the right traditional and cultural path.