For many years, majority of the hundreds of thousands of graduates who partake in the annual National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) program are posted to primary and secondary schools to teach. Graduates across several disciplines, whether they have teaching experience or not, have worked as teachers in schools for their mandatory service year.
This has often had a
negative impact on the students as the corps members exhibit a
lackadaisical attitude to teaching and find it difficult to pass on
their knowledge to the students.
To
buttress this, the Teachers’ Council has said that the mass failure
witnessed in various examinations for primary and secondary school
students is partly caused by the Youth Corps members who are posted to
teach without being qualified.
The Teachers’ Registration Council of Nigeria,
TRCN, on Tuesday, said NYSC authorities should stop
deployment of corps
members, who lack basic knowledge of teaching, to teach in schools. Steve Nwokocha,
the Director of Operations of the Council, said the deployment of
unqualified teachers, like the youth corps members, contributed to the
mass failure being witnessed in the country in recent years.
“The
issue of having mass failure is a process. Part of the people
contributing to the process are these corpers. It is an abuse to our
profession. Government should stop posting youth corpers to teach in
schools. We at the council are against posting of NYSC without teaching
background to schools.“
He
argued that only graduates of education should be posted to schools,
saying the council was ready to rid the country of quack and fake
teachers.
This sounds like welcoming
news from the Teachers’ Council. There is no use posting Corps members
to schools when they have no interest in teaching.