Are school children today spending too much time in formal schooling, overburdened with an excessive amount of academic activities, or overschooled to the detriment of well-rounded development? The telltale signs seem to suggest this could be the case.
Education is and should be multidimensional to develop a well-rounded learner. A multidimensional education seeks to develop learners’ academic or cognitive knowledge, including intellectual skills, critical thinking and problem-solving aptitude. It seeks to develop an emotionally strong and resilient individual, one who is self-aware and emotionally intelligent, to develop purpose and a sense of direction in a learner.
Education seeks to develop social skills that would enable a learner to build quality interpersonal relationships. Education helps to develop skills and the temperaments essential for a rewarding future career and knowledgeable choices about work and life. It helps to promote healthy decision-making in terms of the learner’s behavioural, physical, and mental health.
Education is structured in a way to foster a lifelong love for learning while ensuring a balanced and successful life. Education is supposed to pique our inquisitiveness and unlock our creative potential, hence the need for a wholesome experience in school.
The all-round dimension of education is beneficial to learners of all ages, particularly for children and adolescents who are still in their formative years. The multidimensional nature of education is reflected in the overall curriculum of schools in terms of subjects taught, activities pupils are expected to participate in, and the engagements they are exposed to.
When schooling was balanced and fun
As a school kid, I remember we were taught regular subjects such as mathematics, languages, sciences, civic and moral education, religious knowledge, and physical and health education. Beyond the classroom teaching, however, we engaged in sporting events such as interclass competitions and inter-house sports tourneys, where we sometimes pit our sporting wits against other invited schools. We regularly went on excursions to interesting places such as parks, manufacturing plants, the beach, the ports, and other places to help stimulate our minds and improve our learning experience.
We also engaged in cultural outings to ensure we were fully steeped in our cultural heritage. We actively participated in environmental initiatives such as tree and flower planting, mowing of school lawns, and generally keeping our environment tidy and regenerative. We engaged in handicrafts, making brooms, clay pots and cups, knitting, carpentry, and other crafts. It was a rich experience as a school kid then, and we were always excited to dress up and go to school every morning. There was enough time for every aspect of our lives: schooling/studying, playing, socialising, holidaying, sleeping, and other beneficial activities.
This can hardly be said of the current schooling experience in the country. Today, schooling has become a chore, almost uninspiring to the point that the average school child is not excited to go to school. So, what changed?
Schooling has become one-dimensional
There is a growing concern globally that education is no longer as robust as it used to be, despite the availability of technology today. This is more pronounced in Nigeria, where the government seems to have seeded the sector to private players who are largely driven by profit-making. British educator John Abbott wrote a telling book about the state of modern education that he titled “Overschooled but Undereducated”. Abbott argues that the modern education systems excessively focus on academic accomplishments over and above social skills, emotional intelligence, relationships, coping abilities, and other real-life skills. Thus, young people are academically advanced but lack the skills and maturity needed to navigate real-world challenges.
Indeed, emphasis now is on one aspect of education: academic or cognitive knowledge. School children, even as young as 5-year-olds, today spend an average of eight (8) hours in the classroom daily, particularly in urban centres. Pupils resume school from 8am to 2pm and immediately resume for ‘lesson’ classes for another 2-3 hours. For those whose parents are well-heeled, there is a lesson teacher waiting for them at home.
For many school children, their formal education is an endless circle of reading, writing, assignments, tests, cramming, and examinations that there is hardly any time left for leisure, recreation, travelling, or other exciting and educative activities. School children are overburdened with academic activities, spending an excessive amount of time in formal schooling. Even on holidays, many children are still forced to go to what private schools call ‘summer schools’.
Overschooling is unhelpful
The lack of balance in education, the disproportionate focus on academic cognition at the expense of leisure, social engagements, and recreation, contributes to poor teaching outcomes and a drop in education quality. The proverb “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is indeed a truism. It emphasizes the need for a balance between academic work and other lighthearted activities. Excessive education without the infusion of leisure, recreation and social activities has turned schooling for many pupils into a boring, uninteresting and unfulfilling activity, and as a result, they have ‘switched’ off from education or learning but are simply going through the motions. This lack of interest is reflected in poor classroom performance, a lack of creativity, unruly behaviour and activities, and emotional problems.
Reasons for over-schooling
A key reason for over-schooling is the fact that education has become fully commercialised. Private investors who today dominate the sector due to successive governments’ poor investment in education run schools solely for profit-making. As such, they develop products such as lessons and summer schools to boost revenues and improve their margins. They seem to think there is little to benefit, financially, from non-academic activities. They extend teaching periods to justify the huge school fees they charge parents.
Many schools in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Abuja, and other cities and towns have no sporting or recreational facilities, nor are they even interested in that. Almost all their activities are academic oriented. They seem to believe that more classwork equates to better performance or that quantity leads to quality. Thus, pupils are forced to sit through hours of classroom teaching with hardly any physical or recreational activity. That is counterproductive because exercise or physical activities have been shown to be beneficial to mental abilities, such as memory, focus, and problem-solving.
Global benchmark on daily school hours
For better education outcomes, the World Health Organisation recommended an average of 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise every day for school children aged 5-17. Today, across the world, there is an increasing clamour for shorter daily school hours, with emphasis on quality over quantity. Shorter hours allow school children to engage in other beneficial activities, thus helping to create a balance and wholesome development. Studies have shown that shorter school hours lead to happier, healthier, and more successful education outcomes.
Research in the US by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) showed that shorter school days can lead to improvements in academic performance. According to NBER, pupils attending schools with “shorter days often scored higher on standardized tests than those in schools with longer days.” A study by RAND Corporation, a research institute, on a four-day school week also came to a similar conclusion as NBER’s in terms of the benefits to pupils’ academic performance and even the wellbeing of teachers.
Finland, often cited for its progressive educational policies and consistently high rankings in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), operates a 5-hour school day. Germany, France, and Brazil also run shorter daily school hours. England is experimenting with shorter school weeks. These nations consistently rank as high flyers in international assessment tests. Despite over-schooling in Nigeria, quality continues to drop and academic performance is increasingly poor.
Possible solutions to over-schooling
To change the trajectory of our education, the government must show more commitment to the sector through adequate investment and appropriate policies. Private school owners need to look beyond immediate profit and consider the long-term gains of a well-rounded educational system to the pupils, the school, and the economy. They need to put pupils above profit-making. In any case, adopting a more robust educational practice, which would boost academic performance, should strengthen their case for higher fees. Our education planners must develop an encompassing curriculum and ensure schools implement it to the letter. Most importantly, parents must take responsibility and ensure their children get a proper education, one that is stimulating, fulfilling, and offers better outcomes. Schooling needs to be exciting and fulfilling for today’s children as it was for us back then.
