The Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman has been told to face the real challenges confronting the education sector and jettison the issue of age limit for admission, examination and certification.
This was the response by parents who were reacting to the recent report that the minister barred underage students from participating in the National Examinations Council (NECO) and West African Examinations Council (WAEC) examinations.
They said, ‘’such issue is the least of the challenges in the sector.
Some of them who spoke under the condition of anonymity wondered why the minister is concentrating on the issue of age limit while there are problems of out-of-school children he needed to tackle fast.
“With the mountain of problems in the education sector, why is age the real issue for the Education Minister? We have the out-of-school children which is still increasing by the day and every time, the minister keeps talking about the issue of age limit in the news,” they said
Recall that the minister also insisted that the new minimum age for admission into tertiary institutions will be 18 years.
Such decisions they noted have serious consequences for the bodies that handle the examinations, parents, students and the entire sector.
“Almost all the children that graduated from secondary school are below 18 years. I believe that this will continue in the next few years. So students will finish by 16 and wait for two years to write WAEC? This is not right at all.’’
One of the parents stated that the policy was a retrogressive one and outdated adding that the world has moved to robotics and Artificial intelligence.
“We are in the twenty 21st century, talking about AI, and robotics, and the minister is busy trying to enforce outdated policy which was initiated when a child will have to place his hand over his or her head to touch the ear before being admitted into primary school,” he lamented.
Also speaking, a parent who is an educationist, Bola Ajibade noted that if the minister wants to implement the policy correctly, he should concentrate on the point of enrolment from primary school.
She said, ‘’the best place to start is when enrolling children for primary education. The ones that have made the ‘mistakes’, according to them, should be allowed to continue. They should start it up maybe this year on early entry to school. It is wrong for him to announce plans in the heat of the moment without thinking things through and then create fresh problems.’’
