But what is a polytechnic? As the name implies, a polytechnic is not a university. But this ought not to be a crime but a mere emblem of distinctive identity. In its classical state, a polytechnic is a non-university higher educational institution focusing on vocational education. There are three factors at play here which often account for the erosion of parity and esteem when the polytechnic community is compared to the university community.
First, is the false notion that because polytechnic education is mainly vocational, it is merely functional and work-driven. This notion ignores the fact that in certain disciplines, a polytechnic education is more rigorous and quality driven than their university-based counterparts. This explains the preference of employers in fields such as banking, Finance, Engineering, Accounting and Technology for polytechnic graduates over their universities counterparts. In these fields of human endeavour, the polytechnic graduates often arrive “perfectly tuned” and programmed for easy and immediate absorption.
Second is the binary divide traditionally erected between university education and polytechnic education which makes one inaccessible to the other. Although a carryover from our colonial heritage, this divide ignores the reality of cross-breeding, cross-carpeting, cross-fertilisation and the transfer of talents and human resources between the two types of education that have existed across age and human societies.
The third factor arises from the fact that entry-level qualifications for polytechnics tend to be lower than those for universities and the staff generally less qualified. While this is true, this stigma ignores the human capacity for self-improvement and continuous exertion. There are sandwich degree programmes and other avenues for self-realisation for those who start the relay race of education at a disadvantage. In certain circumstances, teachers with lesser qualifications, because they have more to prove, are generally more focused and more ferociously determined to impart quality education than their better qualified colleagues. Although there is usually no short cut to pedagogic distinction, it is so that under the right atmosphere, these disadvantaged students and teachers often come into their own, and it is where you end up that matters rather than where you begin from.
The example of Albert Einstein again readily comes to mind. The German-Jewish genius was a famously lazy, sloppy and inattentive student. But this was not because he was mentally challenged but because the precocious boy had greater issues on his mind. Einstein was bored to death by the banality of his teachers and as he himself was later to put it: “Since I hated authority so much, God made me an authority”. How many potential Einstein would have been destroyed in the grinding gridlock of the Nigerian educational system?
In Nigeria, the stigmatization and discrimination against polytechnic education began right after independence when the first Cookie Commission of Enquiry set up a salary differential between university graduates and their polytechnic counterparts. Even worse is the fact that in universities, you cannot join the council in congregation unless you are a degree holder.
In 2006, the Nigerian federal authorities took what at first appeared as a bold and courageous step to harmonise and consolidate tertiary education in the country by virtually abolishing polytechnic education. Inaugurating the technical committee, Ufot Ekaette, the then Secretary to the Federal Government, noted that no country could achieve scientific and technological breakthrough when less than fifteen per cent of the populace have access to university education. According to him, the existing facilities were so oversubscribed that the entire educational system faced an apocalyptic meltdown.
On the face of it, this seems to be a revolutionary and radically innovative development; an admirable example of visionary and proactive governance. But on closer examination, there seemed to be something sinister and radically obtuse going on. There is no evidence that the momentous conclusions were arrived at after a holistic, exhaustive and comprehensive study of the country-specific needs of tertiary education in Nigeria. Had there been a more crucial interrogation of the dynamics of technological and societal under-development in the nation, the conclusions might have been different.
Several decades later, the country is still jogging in the jungle of misguided modernization. Once there is no organic nationalist elite bent on driving the project and process of modernity, a nation labours in vain.
by Tatalo Alamu @TheNation
