By: Salisu Suleiman
I write to inform you that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the umbrella body of Nigerian university teachers has embarked on yet another series of strikes. As you read this, all 177 public universities have been shut down, with no date set for their reopening. But this letter is not about ASUU strikes – that happens every year. I write to inform you about what school and learning are like even when ASUU isn’t on strike.
Today, nothing is as you recall. School may have given you some of the happiest years in life, enlightenment, education and a future. What I see today are bleak, blank faces, gazing at bleak, bland futures. I do not see the cheery days and starry nights you recall so fondly. The tower you remember has crashed down to the dungeons of decrepit desolation and disrepair; from an incubator of fresh thinking, it is now a prison of dead thoughts. What I perceive from the prism of this prison is a picture not of enlightenment at its highest peak, but ignorance at its darkest pitch.
What I see is truth tethered on the tentacle of lies and facts fanned by farce. What I see is a dearth of research, paucity of original thinking and plentiful of intellectual inertia. I see teachers who grimace at the embrace of technology then retreat to their comfort zones of submerged subterfuge, prostituting posterity for pittance. They teach in public schools, but all have children in private schools.
You say you made your best friends in school, but through the miasma that shrouds the clouds of today’s comradeship, what I see are the bonfires of the occult as they sweat, shiver and shout; they see everything and nothing; they strangle, shoot and stab; they climb a mound of skulls for a moment of transient clout that is premised on pretexts, lies, fears and tears. I see no lasting friendships in that fraternity.
I interact with students who know everything about soccer, nothing about Socrates; all about Arsenal, nothing about Aristotle; all about Maradona, nothing about Michelangelo; all about Pele, nothing about Plato. I see the mast of memories misted by the fog of foiled, failed folios. Next time you tell me I can’t speak, read or write English, I will tell you that I speak better English than my teachers. Next time you say youths today are without creativity or intellect, I will tell you that I am taught by professors who have published nothing in a dozen years.
Through the prism of so many prisons, I see once cherished values dragged into the gutter of moral penury; I see students storming through a million pages without comprehension for a piece of parchment; I see culture confined to the cellars of a confused continuum called civilized conduct; I see scions reject time honored symphonies to go searching, picking and parodying primordial patterns from which they obtain no education, no enlightenment and nothing of the nuances needed to knead a livelihood.
In school today, the search for truth means nothing; students lie and cheat with sacred texts that meant something to get scores that leave them sharing no shade and no shelter from once shielded sanctuaries, now synods of sybaritic sacrilege. Today, merit is wasting and cheating is paying; dirges announce the birth of new ideas and pyres precede professors powerless to pirate patents. And because government is on a stretched, secluded sabbatical, it has lost touch with my teachers. So they teach for three months and strike for six.
In the hostels you recall like yesterday, I am awakened by the bedlam of students scurrying to fetch water to wash their faces and cook their meals; I see 16 students crammed into the single room you once lived alone. On the shelves where you kept your books are kerosene stoves; in the wardrobes where you once hung your shirts are sacks of food; in the hands of graduate students, I see lecture notes stenciled from back in the 1980s; the libraries are homes to books of antiquity and today’s seminars, a bizarre bazaar of intellectual ineptitude.
In class, we are plied with new lies to quell old fears. What I see is the deliberate death dance of a fast fading educational system. I see ivory towers anchored on the rusty chains of complacency and I fear the emptiness of an education that is stilted, shapeless, shrouded in mystery, mindless, meaningless.
What I am trying to say is that even when ASUU isn’t on strike, I go out to class every day with a numb mechanical monotony, seeing nothing, learning nothing.
I write to inform you that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the umbrella body of Nigerian university teachers has embarked on yet another series of strikes. As you read this, all 177 public universities have been shut down, with no date set for their reopening. But this letter is not about ASUU strikes – that happens every year. I write to inform you about what school and learning are like even when ASUU isn’t on strike.
Today, nothing is as you recall. School may have given you some of the happiest years in life, enlightenment, education and a future. What I see today are bleak, blank faces, gazing at bleak, bland futures. I do not see the cheery days and starry nights you recall so fondly. The tower you remember has crashed down to the dungeons of decrepit desolation and disrepair; from an incubator of fresh thinking, it is now a prison of dead thoughts. What I perceive from the prism of this prison is a picture not of enlightenment at its highest peak, but ignorance at its darkest pitch.
What I see is truth tethered on the tentacle of lies and facts fanned by farce. What I see is a dearth of research, paucity of original thinking and plentiful of intellectual inertia. I see teachers who grimace at the embrace of technology then retreat to their comfort zones of submerged subterfuge, prostituting posterity for pittance. They teach in public schools, but all have children in private schools.
You say you made your best friends in school, but through the miasma that shrouds the clouds of today’s comradeship, what I see are the bonfires of the occult as they sweat, shiver and shout; they see everything and nothing; they strangle, shoot and stab; they climb a mound of skulls for a moment of transient clout that is premised on pretexts, lies, fears and tears. I see no lasting friendships in that fraternity.
I interact with students who know everything about soccer, nothing about Socrates; all about Arsenal, nothing about Aristotle; all about Maradona, nothing about Michelangelo; all about Pele, nothing about Plato. I see the mast of memories misted by the fog of foiled, failed folios. Next time you tell me I can’t speak, read or write English, I will tell you that I speak better English than my teachers. Next time you say youths today are without creativity or intellect, I will tell you that I am taught by professors who have published nothing in a dozen years.
Through the prism of so many prisons, I see once cherished values dragged into the gutter of moral penury; I see students storming through a million pages without comprehension for a piece of parchment; I see culture confined to the cellars of a confused continuum called civilized conduct; I see scions reject time honored symphonies to go searching, picking and parodying primordial patterns from which they obtain no education, no enlightenment and nothing of the nuances needed to knead a livelihood.
In school today, the search for truth means nothing; students lie and cheat with sacred texts that meant something to get scores that leave them sharing no shade and no shelter from once shielded sanctuaries, now synods of sybaritic sacrilege. Today, merit is wasting and cheating is paying; dirges announce the birth of new ideas and pyres precede professors powerless to pirate patents. And because government is on a stretched, secluded sabbatical, it has lost touch with my teachers. So they teach for three months and strike for six.
In the hostels you recall like yesterday, I am awakened by the bedlam of students scurrying to fetch water to wash their faces and cook their meals; I see 16 students crammed into the single room you once lived alone. On the shelves where you kept your books are kerosene stoves; in the wardrobes where you once hung your shirts are sacks of food; in the hands of graduate students, I see lecture notes stenciled from back in the 1980s; the libraries are homes to books of antiquity and today’s seminars, a bizarre bazaar of intellectual ineptitude.
In class, we are plied with new lies to quell old fears. What I see is the deliberate death dance of a fast fading educational system. I see ivory towers anchored on the rusty chains of complacency and I fear the emptiness of an education that is stilted, shapeless, shrouded in mystery, mindless, meaningless.
What I am trying to say is that even when ASUU isn’t on strike, I go out to class every day with a numb mechanical monotony, seeing nothing, learning nothing.
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