Just recently, after Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) released its 2021 UTME results, there have been many arguments on what went wrong. Some have blamed the mass failure on JAMB while others disagreed.
While many are blaming JAMB for the decline in students’ performance, the board blamed the students for lack of seriousness resulting in the mass failure, just as students are saying that JAMB intentionally failed them.
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It is hard to prove the actual cause of the massive failure among youths without proper investigation, but by looking at students’ failure rate, one could attribute the downward trends to many factors.
The topmost of it is the rate at which students spend many hours on social media, which is very disturbing, indeed.
Go to those platforms and see how youth compete with one another on trending issues and useless comments.
If such students can spend a fraction of the number of hours they spend on social media reading their books, they will have a mastery of every subject.
This is aggravated by the excessive desire among most of the youth to watch football be it local competitions or international encounters almost on a daily basis to the detriment of their academic pursuits.
Also, imagine the number of hours teenagers spend every day watching movies on DSTV, StarTimes and other stations. Many of the movies students spend most of their time watching add no academic value to them. It is a thief of time.
Nowadays, the only talents our youths have is music, dancing, acting and stand-up comedy particularly, on social media.
On the part of parents, they buy expensive phones for their children to enable them to access all social media platforms. They subscribe to several stations to keep their wards busy with movies and other uneducated programmes. How many parents have a reading timetable for their children?
Today, many parents who complain of their children’s failure leave home at 6 a.m., depending on where they live, and come back at 11 pm, leaving their children in the care of house-helps and teachers in private schools or neighbours.
Many parents have forgotten that after school, the remaining hours are for them to check their children’s homework, classwork and what they have learned at school.
Parents and guardians should stop blaming JAMB or the government for their wards’ failure. It is all about our fast-changing values and orientation.
Usman Usman Garba sent this from Kano
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