New Nation, New Schools

"The biggest thing in Nigeria today," shouted the young Yoruba against the din of a High Life band* in a Lagos cafe, "is education." He waved a beer glass at the sashaying High Lifers: "This is Nigeria. Why should we feel that sophistication is whisky and soda and a West End striptease? Real sophistication here is an educational system designed for Nigerians." With help and inspiration from the U.S., that is what Nigeria is fast getting.

By African standards, Nigeria is already the best-schooled new nation, as well as the most populous (40 million). In 1945 it had virtually no schooling; now it has 3,100,000 primary-school students. The Western Region's University College at Ibadan, opened in 1948 as an affiliate of the University of London, is black Africa's biggest college (1,100 students). A U.S. team from Michigan State University has just opened Nigeria's second major campus, the Eastern Region's University of Nigeria (300 students).

"Frightening Importance." Yet Nigeria, which is bigger in area than any European country except Russia, still has only about 50 dentists and 1,000 physicians (one for every 40,000 people). Only one child in 65 completes eight years of schooling, one in 3,000 gets secondary education, one in 84,000 goes farther on. This produces 800 university graduates a year, of which 600 are trained abroad, and Nigeria needs at least twice as many.

Putting first things first, the Western and Eastern regions spent 40% of their budget on primary schools. But many primary teachers have only primary education--which measures the need for more secondary schools and colleges. Toward that end, Nigeria is now mulling a heady new plan, the work of a Carnegie-financed commission headed by Sir Eric Ashby, Master of Clare College, Cambridge University. The commission set out to imagine "Nigeria in 1980, a nation of some 50 million people, a voice to be listened to in the Christian and the Moslem worlds, a nation that is taking its place in a technological civilization." The commission urged Nigeria to boost sharply teacher and technical training, to triple secondary-school enrollment, and create two new universities with a total of at least 7,500 students by 1970. Cost: about $135 million. One commission member, Dean Francis Keppel of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, called it "a task of frightening importance."

Conversion in Boston. Many Nigerian students, like their colonial counterparts in Asia and the rest of Africa, have long felt equatorially Oxonian about their education. The lucky student who passes entrance exams, happy in the knowledge that he can never again be called "boy," considers himself part of an anointed elite. On graduation, he feels that he can preserve his special status only by entering the civil service. Until lately, upon landing at Ibadan's lavish campus, the undergraduate has hardly had to lift a finger. Room servants tended his every need. When Ibadan recently put in a cafeteria, outraged students went on strike.

It didn't last. And Nigeria has at last warmed up to U.S.-style education. For years British-trained Nigerians chained students to a syllabus that taught all about 18th century England; they scorned as unfit for Nigeria the U.S. blend of liberal and practical schooling. That attitude is now dying. Converts include such once ferocious critics as the Western Region's former Education Minister Stephen Awokoya, who visited the U.S., changed his mind one night in a Boston hotel. Said he: "If this system of education can develop the highly admirable culture that exists in the U.S. today, there must be something to it."

Nigeria's Eastern Region has moved even faster toward U.S. ideas. Prime mover is the area's top politician, Dr. Nnamdi ("Zik") Azikiwe, a Lincoln University product who is Nigeria's Governor General. Zik brought in the Michigan State education team (financed by the International Cooperation Administration) that set up the East's $30 million University of Nigeria in Nsukka. Starting with liberal arts, the school also aims to teach agriculture, engineering, science and education to 6,000 students in ten years.

"Oh, Sir!" The school's first students have been startled at the rolled-up-sleeves attitude of their seven top U.S. faculty members. They expected donnish tea and talk from Dean Alvin D. Loving, a U.S. Negro, instead found him wading in the mud, bossing construction workers. Even old Oxonians now gruffly praise the notion that education can honor "the dignity of labor," and that professors should research sociological and economic problems. Half the country's university students are now studying not Blackstone, Cicero or Tennyson but science and medicine.

The Ashby Report has stirred new hope and ambition. As one Lagos schoolboy put it last week: "I am not the smartest in my class, but I am not the dumbest. Until I heard of the new plan, I had no hope of going on. Now I think I can. Oh, sir! I will study very hard, and maybe I will be as good or better than the smartest ones."

* Specialists in a soft, syncopated West African dance that sprang up some five years ago, notably in Nigeria and Ghana. No two dancers use the same step. The music is any rolling, happy tune, though calypso makes a good accompaniment.

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