Baraje seeks return of history to Nigeria’s education curriculum to curb social vices

Stephen Olufemi Oni, Ilorin

An Educationist, Alhaji Abubakar Kawu Baraje, has picked hole in the nation’s education curriculum for lacking the teaching of history from the basic level to the tertiary level.

Baraje, who is the founder and financier of Baraje Centre for Islamic and Arabic Studies, Gerewu in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, blamed non teaching of history on some of the societal challenges confronting Nigeria today.

Speaking at a Book launch and Meritorious Award of Excellence presentation of the Centre for Ilorin Studies, University of Ilorin where he received an award, lamented that children of nowadays had jettisoned their norms, cultures, values and tradition because of lack of history teaching, thereby imbibing alien cultures they are exposed to through the media, particularly social media.

Baraje said: “Some of us who were teachers are seriously against the fact that the curriculum that we are now running in our Secondary Schools right from the primary school to the tertiary Institutions has a lot of holes and one of the major holes is the abolition of teaching of history because there is no today without yesterday and there can never be tomorrow without today. So if people don’t know, if children don’t know where they are coming from definitely they will behave any how, act any how and jettison the value they would be taught in history.

“They won’t know history, they won’t appreciate it so they will pick other people’s values that are not appreciable to us and that is the problem like.”

Baraje, a former Acting National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, said most of them in the education sector knew that it would spell doom when teaching of history was removed from education curriculum, pointing out that if people could learn from history, the rate of killings, smoking of hard drugs and other societal ills would stop.

According to him, “when the teaching of history was taken away from the curriculum, many of us particularly those of us who were trained as teachers we knew there is a doom coming. All that you now see, killing of people, smoking helm, and taking hard drugs is because we have misplaced our values, because there was no value to be taught, so that is exactly what it means.”

Baraje, however, advocated the return of history teaching into the country’s curriculum, saying that with last year’s position of the Federal Ministry of Education to look at the possibility of bringing back history, there could be assurance of reduction in societal ills.

The Board of Trustee Member of the Peoples Democratic Party therefore stressed the need to identify with the local cultures, values, norms and tradition by not allowing alien or foreign cultures to supersede the local ones.


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