Indigenous Education In Nigeria Essay

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EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA: THE PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES OF TEACHING/LEARNING HISTORY IN NIGERIA

Afolabi, O. Oluwaseun
Peace and Conflict Studies Programme,
Institute for Peace and Strategic Studies,
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.
Email: oluwaseunafolabi@gmail.com

Abstract
The paper discusses the challenges facing history teaching in Nigeria. The scope of the study is limited to private/public schools in Oyo State, Nigeria. The study starts by tracing the problem from the advent of missionaries to Nigeria in which their purpose of establishing mission schools was not to teach African history but to evangelize and to produce middlemen who will act as junior officers. The findings show that history as a subject was in the curriculum of both junior and senior secondary school. However, it was removed from junior secondary school curriculum and remained only in senior secondary …show more content…

Indigenous education represents the type of education offered in the pre-literate era, within the community, by community members who possessed specialised skills or abilities in various fields of human endeavour. The main aims of African customary education may be identified as follows:
1. To preserve the cultural heritage of the extended family, the clan and tribe;
2. to adapt members of the new generation to their physical environment and teach them how to control and use it; and
3. to explain to them their own future, and that of their community, depends on the understanding and perpetuation of the institutions, laws, language and values inherited from the past.
Thus, the content of African customary education grew out of the physical and, what is more important for our present purpose, social situation. Both formal and informal processes were utilized for the transmission of knowledge, skills, ideas, attitudes and patterns of

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