By Raji Ade Oba (RAJ COMMUNICATIONS)
For the Deaf community in Nigeria, we might have been compromising with difficulties. There are strong, evidence-based indications that our hearing disability is the predominant reason for why the majority of Deaf people are “special education teachers”, rather than Computer programmers, Mathematicians, Physicists, and researchers. But in fact, Deaf students in secondary schools and colleges might have been letting the “scale of their disability” choose for them education courses and disciplines, rather than more ambitious STEM disciplines- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and perhaps, arts and humanities courses.
Rather than see and convert our handicaps into stepping stones on which we may climb toward some worthy goal, a stupefying percentage of Deaf individuals, including adolescents and adults in Nigeria have accepted deafness as an obstacle, and have continually used it as an alibi for neglecting to undergo secondary and tertiary educational training in science and technology-related subjects and courses.
We now have more than enough special education teachers across our schools in the Federation- but special education (Deaf) teachers with insufficient training and little competence to cope with the intellectual demand and rigour that are required by true special education services.
A whole lot of so-called special education teachers are just too intellectually unqualified to be in front of the classroom, let alone deliver standardized special education/clinical services.
Independent studies, including personal observations, that have been dutifully gathered by this writer have revealed that a staggering number of Deaf people – over 85% among a little over 11 million Nigerians with hearing loss, would rather choose to study special education or educational-related courses and eventually become teachers, rather than read the sciences and become a medical health professional or an aeronautical engineer.
A survey of special needs students in a major secondary school for the special needs in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria- with a focus on deaf learners, shows that 2 out of 3 deaf learners that are currently sitting their Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE) are commercial and art students. And the measly number of deaf students in the sciences lack basic scientific knowledge- they almost do not know the fundamentals of algebraic expressions nor could the average “deaf science student” identify and classify with accuracy simple elements and compounds.
This is hardly the Deaf world we deserve in a nation that’s second to none in human and economic might in Africa.
Educational courses and disciplines are fascinating and ambitious. The study of education, although, may generally combine the studies of history, sociology and ethics with of course theoretical approaches, the pervasive decision on the part of the Deaf learners in Nigeria to focus solely on educational disciplines is not a recipe for how we are going to realize the enormous potentials that lie in each one of us, nether is the rampant study of educational courses in universities and colleges a means to lead others – the disabled and non-disabled in understanding, and possibly curing, some of our most devastating diseases and conditions: to regenerate, for example, a severed spinal cord and lift someone from a wheelchair; to spur insulin production and spare a child from a lifetime of needles; to treat autism, intellectual and neurodevelopmental disorders, including HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease and others that affect millions of Nigerians and their loved ones.
Indeed, there is an incredible yearning of Deaf kids and adolescents in special schools to be scientists and researchers, doctors and innovators, engineers and computer programmers when they grow up. The structural state of education- special education, in particular, has not indicated its readiness to help these ambitious individuals to realize these dreams.
Education in Nigeria is in jeopardy. State-owned and state-managed primary and secondary schools across the country are in a terrible bad shape that literally looks beyond repair. Classes and students’ pieces of furniture for reading, including laboratories for conduction of experiments are an eyesore. Teachers’ rooms and structural working conditions are so nauseating somebody would look at these and want to throw up. But the remuneration of teachers across state schools in Nigeria is just a phenomenon that’s not worthy of entertaining in a stately conversation.
However, perhaps, even more, worrisome is the fate that would soon befall universities in Nigeria.
Consequent upon all of those, alongside self-imposed limits that Deaf learners and individuals have placed on themselves, more of us have chosen to neglect to pursue degrees in the science and technology arenas, and would, instead, for the sake of expediency, choose to study special education and become “special education teachers”.
The likes of Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, Ludwig Van Beethoven, including of course, Deaf missionary Andrew Foster, Paul Mba- notable deaf individuals who dreamed hard without fear and boundary and overcame tremendous obstacles of their own to become a writer and an artist, a scientist, a classical composer and educators- would be spinning in their graves- they must be extremely disappointed in our culturally pervasive decision to all go to school to study special education and become special education teachers; disappointed in our choice of the easy way rather than the hard way; disenchanted in our decision to be ill-trained special education teachers rather than scientists who are going to help wipe out a number of ravaging diseases that continually cause disabilities and deaths.
The current prevailing status quo in the Deaf community oughtn’t to be. The deaf, with our extraordinary intelligence, which though not usually readily manifested, as well as our creativity, can dream hard and pursue more ambitious, more significant disciplines that are relevant to the dynamics of today, and demonstrate that, in fact, our affliction is not a liability, but an asset of great value.
The strategies for achieving these recommended ambitions- making more scientists and computer programmers out of us, rather than teachers, would be carefully explained in the next concluding article.
Happy Labour Day and a New Month!