If there is anything I value more during my secondary school days apart from the adventure to the jungle (which was indirectly like an extra curriculum activity on the student level) is the creativity of the technical students.. We call them vocational students... The school in a sense, seems to me a perfect school, in the sense that what has been communicated theoretically in the class is been practicalized. As a follow up to the question I asked about the paradigm for evaluating academic excellence.. I forgot to situate my question... In Nigeria. One out of all that i mentioned can be taken as a paradigm, but such thing do not exist in our academic enterprise..I'm sure many will pick Ph. D.... Well, academically, Ph. D is the highest degree. But, Ph. D is not the paradigm for evaluating academic excellence.. Because, in Nigeria, we have a volcano of Ph.D holders, a mountain of master degree holders, a pyramid of Bachelor degree holders, a hill of HND degree holders, and trees of NCE, OND, O level, JSCE, Primary school certificate, bearers but... What can we say about inventions?.... A professor of electrical engineering who could not device the type of bulb he desires in his house... A Ph.D holder in Civil engineering who could not create his own working compass.. And many of such cases we find in all our universities, Polytechnics and what ve you. It turned out that everyone cannot and should not go to the University. Academics should be for those who have the capacity. Some are naturally talented in such a way that one will be forced to ask if such person actually acquired a degree. This doesn't mean that every1 should not have a formal education of how to read, speak and write. Unfortnatly, majority in Nigeria wants to go to the “University" etc. which eventually makes us wallowing in the same lagoon. My submission is: We need a reconstruction of our ideas about education, and emphasis the pragmatic nature of education so that next generations will not find it difficult as we have it now.*........
Santus 2018