All Africa notes that the collapse of the Nigerian educational system has been attributed to the failure of teaching and learning (and not learning and teaching) of English Language in schools. President of The Pulitzar Club Nigeria , Mr. Henry-Otis Amurun said this during an Education Roundtable on ‘The Incipient Catastrophe in Education: Fact or Fiction?’, to mark this year’s World Book Day.

Amuran said, ‘We are going about teaching English because it is the most important language of communication in these schools, this is not to say that we have any thing against local languages, but we don’t have expertise in local languages, our expertise is in English. If the children do not learn English, how can they learn other subjects, how can they become engineers and doctors? For now, English is the medium of instruction that is why we are teaching it.’ He’s got a point, you know.

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Tanzania: English to Take Over As Teaching Medium

The government recently expressed its plans to make English language the medium of teaching and learning in schools starting from primary to tertiary levels, but warned that the move could be delayed due to lack of competent English teachers (!).

The minister for Education and Vocational Training, Prof Jumanne Maghembe, said that the government wishes to do it as soon as possible but it faces some challenges to reach this goal. One of them is that there aren’t sufficient confident teachers to do this in both primary and secondary schools, no professors in colleges and other higher learning institutions. Bit of a problem, I have to agree.

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