…MORNING DIET
It is quite alarming the rate at which younger folks loose interest in education in recent times for the want of greener pastures.
Are you not surprised at the modern madness by the government, where hoodlums and criminals are given preference instead of educated patriots who are key economic players?
Government now tend to satisfy the desires of hoodlums and touts and leave the educated ones to fight for their fate on the ground that there are no jobs.
Our young ones now see going to the tertiary institutions as a complete waste of time because, those who does not go to school are now receiving golden chances in the society.
Some would rather prefer to learn physical skills than having just a valueless paper certificate, others tend to join the recent lucrative internet fraud called Yahoo to fend for themselves while those with paper and intellectual qualifications are roaming in the streets without any recognition.
Even some whom have acquired paper certificates are now tempted by the happenstance of things to venture into the fraudulent acts.
Take for instance, a parent who spend veritable millions to send one of his child to school and after graduating with 2;1 or 2:2, the child started looking for job for over 5 years and above, there has been nothing to reap therefrom, but another of his child who just finished the secondary school sought for a menial job to get an android phone and in spate of a year he has changed the narratives of the family for better without robbing a bank, being involved in street armed robbery or cultism.
This will appeal to every right thinking mind to harbour more of his folks into the seemingly lucrative line which hitherto is not healthy for the general economic wellbeing.
Though I am not in any way trying to palliate the destructive effect of this internet fraud to the economy or the society at large, but our contemporary polity has downgraded the value of education to that level that people no longer see any reason for it because fraudulence, criminality and violent rascallity now payoff more than education in our modern society. This is excruciatingly pathetic.
At about this time last year, I was advising a younger folk whom had lost total interest in being educated, on the need to be educated. She reiterated and pointed at a graduate in the compound saying ‘what have those whom had graduated from school to show for it, are they not the same people roaming in this compound with me everyday?’
This question almost got me transfected and electrocuted as I suddenly became bereft of ideas to further convince her of the need to be educated after she had pointed to me categorically graduates leaving jobless in our premises.
Another encounter that got my heart wounded about the contemporary decline of educational value in our society, was when a junior student met me to seek an advise on whether or not he should quit school for yahoo business.
The young man told me that, his best friend who was relatively doing well academically, had quited his studies for to do yahoo business in Ghana and now he has bought his own car and built a mansion all under one year.
After laying series of complaints, he concluded that he wants to quit as well, as his friend was mounting an irresistible pressure on him to come over to Ghana. But then he sought for my words and I told him just a sentence “The water you are meant to drink in a river can never flow past you”.
He however, reiterated that what’s the need of going to school and after graduating you’d be roaming in the streets looking for what to survive on when you can actually sit in your room, press your phone and make millions?
To forestall and quench his curiosity, I finalized by saying‘ the rapid degradation of academic value is highly disheartening but the worth of its attainment can never be eroded, and secondly any wealth acquired illegally is temporary and it does not come without its inherent quagmires’.
This statement went a long way into his mind as he affirmed that he would finish his studies first before anything else would surface.
Conclusively, I want to upon this backdrop, opine that government at all levels should not only build physical structures in the name of prioritising education, but should as well create more channels to engage graduates meaningfully for the value of being educated to be wholesome again in the society and to serve as a thalidomide to the lack of educational interest in our growing youths.
