Home truth from JAMB

 Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Registrar, Prof. Is’haq Oloyede, has a reputation for brutal candour and he lived up to that reputation recently. He deplored suffocating presence of parents at Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres across the country and ordered them out of the room.

Oloyede was reported to have directed all CBT centres to henceforth bar parents from their registration halls. A statement by spokesperson for the Ilorin JAMB office, Hassan Lawal, explained that the Registrar made the decision after inspecting some registration centres in Kwara State and seeing them overcrowded. “The Registrar said it has been discovered that parents / guardians are always a distraction to both candidates and the centres, and at the same time congesting the halls by not following the COVID-19 protocols,” he stated.

According to the statement, Oloyede also advised parents / guardians to stop pushing the education of their wards faster than necessary. “For example, a 14 or 15-year-old is not matured enough to undergo the process of registration and university pressure and are vulnerable to exploitation by scammers out there,” he was reported saying. He as well enjoined state ministries of education and other relevant stakeholders saddled with enrolling students into secondary schools to always ascertain their true age before being admitted.

The JAMB boss can’t be more spot on about the state of Nigerian education, whereby underage studentship has become a blight of the system. Early education syndrome has seen secondary schools become populated by pupils barely above kindergarten age and universities by mid-teenagers, with all tendencies associated with immaturity and childhood naivety characterising those systems. Pupils are so young they can’t be left to handle JAMB registration formalities without parents being on hand; and many universities these days have parents forum similar in preoccupation to parents-teachers associations in secondary schools.

Yet there was a time in our history when admission into elementary school was based on maturity being demonstrated, like asking an intending pupil to reach over his head and touch the other ear. Even as we speak, there are nations that block kid geniuses from university education just for being underage; meaning you do not get admitted into college, no matter your intellectual prowess, until you attain a minimum age and level of maturity. Psychologists would confirm there is a connection between cognitive level and behavioural tendencies like capacity to withstand peer pressure, response to task pressure and ability to cope with unmet expectations, among other things that characterise life of relative independence that university education involves. There might, indeed, be a link between underage studentship and the general standard of education today.

Oloyede rendered good service bringing this challenge into focus. But one would expect it falls within JAMB’s remit to prescribe or, at least, recommend an age criterion for university education. He stopped short of doing that and it is curious.