Enugu State Governor, Peter Mbah, says Nigeria graduates are not innovative and inventive because they are not exposed to productive skills and competencies in discovering new things through experiential learning.
The governor made this statement while delivering the 1st Enugu State University of Science and Technology, ESUT, Distinguished Personalities Lecture Series entitled “Experiential Learning: Building the Wealth of the Nation.” on Tuesday in Enugu.
Mbah said the Nigeria’s current education model and spending could not deliver the much-needed speedy development and economic transformation.
The governor, however, called for an urgent paradigm shift from rote or memorisation to experiential learning, which he described as the missing link among education, industrialisation, and GDP growth.
“Why do Nigerian universities seldom feature on the global ranking list of world’s best universities? Why have they seemed perennially unable to become the ideas factory which universities ought to be? Why are our universities not producing inventive graduates?
“The answers to these questions lie in many inconvenient truths, amongst which is the fact that the learning in our schools, from basic to tertiary, has for years not imbued our young people with productive skills and competencies. This is a root cause of our underdevelopment,” he said.
According to him, nations like US, China, Germany, and Netherlands, which invested the most in building a qualitative and experiential education ecosystem were the world’s leading economies.
The governor said his administration was currently building 260 Smart Green Schools to power experiential learning in the 260 wards of Enugu State.
He stressed that by embedding the model from the basic to tertiary levels of education, Enugu was creating a seamless pipeline where students progress from foundational learning to practical innovation.
Mbah also directed all state-owned tertiary institutions to deliver experiential learning going forward.
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