Curriculum Implementation Challenges and Private Education in Nigeria

Nigeria’s population is over 180 million by estimation. It is not out of place to assume that she is one of the fastest growing populations in the world. In as much as she celebrates her status as the giant of Africa, her place as ‘a giant’ calls for a reflective thought at the rate with which her educational curriculum operates mainly in paper forms. On the issue of the private education, many challenges such as; shortage of qualified teachers without in-service training, structures and infrastructures, interaction with the government for gaining approval, extortion of illegal school tax from proprietors, lack of formal school management procedures like business plans, records and accountability etcetera. The culmination of the above issues is enormous. However, this paper seeks to argue on the negative effects of the 3Rs (rote learning approach) on the Nigerian learners that is promoting poverty and operation. The paper does that using a historical study to suggest for a curriculum that will liberate the Nigerian child, encourage problem solving (critical thinking skills), looks at the implication of the goodwill of a centralized educational curriculum that Nigerian early educational elites partly proposed with the oil boom in mind, the alternative way forward now that the oil has gone low. The paper goes forward to touch on the need to decentralize the educational system and give autonomy for each state to define her community context and design a curriculum that will address her context using the child’s mother tongue for contextualized knowledge that will not sever the child from his/her moral/cultural norms considering how fast they are disappearing. Keywords: Curriculum, Implementation, Context, Mother Tongue, Private Education.