Amaechi Obi: Drastic Measures to Save Nations

How can society be so myopic to the notion that institutions are not the right place to educate their children with the knowledge they will really need to face the world? So many essential activities can be employed to give the best possible education to our beloved children without sending them away from the comfort of home.

I’ve broken down my philosophy on this to the following points:

l Stop sending your children to schools under obligation to serve a faceless academic institution that does not teach how to achieve self-sufficiency, independence and how to positively manage and balance their lives.

l As a parent, apart from feeding them, clothing them and giving them shelter and love, it is your natural duty to educate your children the best way possible, especially in terms of how to deal with the world in a positive manner.

l As a parent, it is a natural obligation to positively impart to your children your inherited, acquired or discovered knowledge of life leading to a positive path for living. This includes life’s fundamentals such as healthy eating (and cooking), hygiene, how to grow food and care for the plants and animals they need, etc.

l Above all, as a parent you must teach your children how to embrace the natural sense of self-initiative which happens to be the basic rule for attaining self-education.

Think of it this way: if everyone’s personal talents are as different as our fingerprints, how then can a generalised education teach a child to discover his or her given natural potentials and use them for good deeds? That is the parents’ imperative.

It is very unfortunate that so many parents have been deprived of proper, useful education during their school days and now, on their own, find themselves incapable of teaching and educating their own children. This is because they do not know what and how to teach. They were victims themselves of the compulsory system of institutionalised learning that teaches how to conform, not how to question or be truly curious about the world.

In an ideal world, we would encourage people to think and reason out things for themselves, so that respect and family have a chance to be close to each other once again, as it once was before the institutions imposed upon us intended to divide and rule rather than unify and bind.

But today, with the internet, more than ever before we have the opportunity to learn for ourselves and impart important knowledge to our children. Not just reading and writing, the essential skills they need for knowledge, but using the new technological tools available to us, we will also encourage them to discover their natural inclinations. 

This is one of the best ways through which we can begin to regain our natural aptitude for learning and expression of thoughts and instincts. I believe every child would be more cheerful, more clever, more useful to themselves, their families and ultimately to their respective communities at large.

Indeed, when any child is allowed and duly directed to make use of their natural talents, learning for that child will surely become fun, and it won’t be long before they will begin to produce phenomenal and exceptional results. This is the true nature of humans as a species.

No one is truly comfortable with the notion of spending all those years in institutionalised education. Our schools are producing so many unproductive young people – enough is enough. We need to reshuffle and reform our approach to education once and for all.

Amaechi Obi is a writer and peace advocate based in Spain’s Canary Islands