We Left the Teacher Out of the Equation -By Stephen Sunday Laabes

Nigeria’s Education Crisis Is Not About Infrastructure Alone. It Is About What We Have Done to the People Who Teach Our Children.

There is a scene that plays out in schools across Nigeria with a regularity that has made it invisible. A teacher stands at the front of a classroom of fifty children, holding chalk that the school did not provide, writing on a board whose surface has been worn to near-illegibility, delivering a lesson whose content has been prescribed by a curriculum she had no hand in designing, toward an examination that will measure outcomes she had no hand in defining, in a building whose roof leaks when it rains and whose windows no longer close fully against the harmattan. She has not been paid in two months. The parent of one of the children in that classroom sent a message last week questioning why her son scored poorly on the last test, with a tone that suggested the teacher was to blame, that the teacher was not doing enough, that the teacher needed to try harder.

The teacher does not respond to the message. There is nothing useful to say. She goes back to her lesson, which she knows will not produce the outcomes the examination demands, because the examination demands the reproduction of information and not the development of thought, and the development of thought is what she became a teacher to do. She became a teacher because she believed, at some point in her life, that the most important work available to a human being is the work of forming another human being’s mind. She still believes this. She just no longer believes that anyone else in the system believes it too.

This essay is about that teacher. About what has been done to her and to the hundreds of thousands of educators like her across Nigeria, in the name of educational improvement. About the peculiar way in which the conversation about Nigerian education has managed to talk about everything except the professional dignity, the intellectual autonomy, and the material welfare of the people who are supposed to be its primary instrument. And about the urgent, overdue, uncomfortable argument that no reform, no curriculum, no assessment system, no parental involvement initiative, will produce the education this country needs until it reckons honestly with what it has done to its teachers.

The Missing Person in the Education Debate

Nigerian education discourse has a specific and revealing blind spot. Whenever the conversation turns to why children are not learning, the analysis moves quickly to infrastructure, then to curriculum, then to examinations, then to parental engagement, then to out-of-school children, then to funding. All of these are real problems. All of them deserve serious attention. But the conversation almost never arrives at the teacher as a professional whose conditions of work, whose training, whose intellectual development, whose dignity in the classroom, are themselves a determinant of educational outcomes.

When the teacher does appear in the Nigerian education conversation, she appears as a problem to be managed rather than a professional to be supported. Teacher absenteeism. Teacher quality. Teacher accountability. The frame is consistently one of deficit, of a workforce that is not performing at the required level and requires correction. The structural conditions that produce absenteeism, that explain why teacher quality has declined over decades, that account for why the profession no longer attracts the most capable graduates, receive far less attention than the symptoms those conditions produce.

This blind spot is not accidental. It is a reflection of the low status that teaching occupies in Nigerian society, a status that has been declining for decades and that is now so firmly established that its decline is treated as natural rather than as the product of specific policy choices and cultural attitudes that could, if the will existed, be changed. The teacher who was once a respected figure in the community, whose opinion was sought, whose judgment about children was trusted, whose professional expertise was acknowledged, has been reduced in the public imagination to a civil servant of the lower grades, doing a job that anyone could do if they had no other options.

That reduction is costing this country more than it can afford. And the parents who believe they are serving their children by treating the teacher as a service provider to be monitored and corrected are participating in that reduction, with the best possible intentions and the worst possible consequences.

What Parents Get Right and What They Get Wrong

I want to be fair to parents before I am critical of them, because the argument I am making is not that parental involvement in education is wrong. It is not. Parental involvement, done well, is one of the most powerful factors in a child’s educational outcomes. The research on this is unambiguous and has been unambiguous for decades. Children whose parents are engaged with their education, who discuss what they are learning at home, who read to them and with them, who ask questions and take an interest in their intellectual development, do better across every measure that educational research uses.

What parents get right is the instinct. The recognition that education is too important to be left entirely to institutions, that a child’s learning is not something that begins and ends at the school gate, that the home is an educational environment and that what happens there matters enormously for what happens in the classroom. That instinct is correct and should be honoured.

What parents get wrong, with increasing frequency and increasing intensity, is the direction. The energy that should go into the home, into the dinner table conversations and the bedtime reading and the gentle questions about what was learned today, gets redirected instead toward the school, toward the teacher, toward the curriculum and the examination and the grade on the last test. The involvement that should be collaborative becomes adversarial. The parent who should be the teacher’s partner becomes the teacher’s auditor, arriving with complaints and questions and demands and the implicit message that the teacher is not to be trusted to do the job she was trained and appointed to do.

In Nigerian schools, this dynamic has become acute. The combination of genuinely poor educational outcomes, rising anxiety about children’s futures in a difficult economy, the increased communication access that mobile phones provide, and a cultural tendency toward hierarchical intervention when things are not going as expected, has produced a situation in which teachers report spending significant time and energy managing parental demands rather than teaching. Time that is not teaching is time that is not spent on the actual work. The irony is precise and painful: the parental involvement that is supposed to improve educational outcomes is, in its current form, actively obstructing them.

Teaching to the Test and What It Destroys

There is a child somewhere in Nigeria right now who could be a scientist. She does not know this yet. What she knows is that she must pass the next examination, because her parents have told her that passing the examination is the most important thing, because her school has organised its entire timetable around preparing for the examination, because her teacher has no time to explore the question that lit up in the child’s eyes last Tuesday when something unexpected happened in the natural world and she wanted to understand why.

The teacher saw the light in those eyes. Teachers always see it. It is the thing that makes the job worth doing, that moment when a child’s mind catches on something and you can watch the curiosity ignite. The teacher wanted to follow that light, to let the lesson go where the child’s question was pointing, to teach the way teaching is supposed to work, which is by following genuine curiosity wherever it leads. Instead, she redirected. There was content to cover. There was an examination coming. The syllabus did not include space for the question the child had asked, and the examination would not reward the answer even if it was found.

Teaching to the test is the name of this destruction and it is not a Nigerian invention. It is a global phenomenon, most developed in the educational systems that obsess most intensely over standardised measurement of outcomes. But it lands in Nigeria with a particular weight because the examination system here carries a specific kind of social freight. In a country where formal educational credentials are among the few reliable pathways to economic security, and where the economy provides few alternatives for those without the right certificates, the examination is not merely an assessment. It is a verdict. It determines who gets access to the next level, who gets consideration for the job, who gets to be regarded as educated in the full social sense of that word.

When the stakes of an examination are this high, the pressure to teach toward it rather than around it becomes overwhelming. It becomes rational, in the narrow sense, for parents to demand exam preparation rather than intellectual development, for school administrators to allocate time toward revision rather than exploration, for teachers to abandon the parts of their craft that produce genuine learning in favour of the parts that produce the specific performance the examination rewards. The system selects for this behaviour at every level. And the casualty, the deep and largely unacknowledged casualty, is the development of the capacity for original thought that is the only thing that will actually serve these children when they encounter the world that is waiting for them beyond the examination hall.

A country that teaches its children to reproduce rather than to think is a country that is preparing them for a world that no longer exists. The economy that is coming, the one that is already here in its early forms, rewards the capacity to solve problems that have not been solved before, to ask questions that have not been asked before, to see connections that others have missed. None of these capacities are developed by teaching to the test. All of them are developed by the kind of teaching that the current system actively discourages and that the current culture of parental oversight makes progressively more difficult to practice.

What We Pay and What We Signal

There is a thing that a society communicates through what it pays people, and the message is usually clearer than anything said in official speeches about the importance of the profession in question. What Nigeria pays its teachers communicates, in terms that require no translation, what Nigeria thinks of the work of teaching.

The average public school teacher in Nigeria earns a salary that, in many states, falls below the official minimum wage when it is paid at all, which it frequently is not on any reliable schedule. In some states, salary arrears for teachers stretch across months, occasionally across years. The teacher who has not been paid for three months is not a teacher who can fully attend to the intellectual development of her students. She is a person managing a financial crisis while also attempting to teach, which is a combination that would compromise the performance of anyone in any profession.

Private school teachers, particularly in the lower-fee private schools that serve the majority of urban Nigerian families who have left the public system, often earn less than their public school counterparts and with none of the job security that the public sector at least nominally provides. The private sector in Nigerian education is not, in the main, a sector of well-resourced institutions with competitive salaries and professional development budgets. It is a sector of under-resourced institutions competing on fees in a market where the primary competitive advantage is the perception of better outcomes, which creates pressure to produce better examination results through whatever means are available, which produces more teaching to the test, which produces less actual education.

The salary is not only a material problem. It is a signal. When a society pays the people who form the minds of its children at the rate it pays the people who guard its car parks, it is communicating a judgment about the relative importance of those activities. Young people receive this signal. The most capable graduates, the ones who would make the most transformative teachers, receive this signal and make a different choice. The pipeline of talent into teaching narrows. The profession becomes the option of last resort rather than the option of first choice. And then we observe declining educational outcomes and ask why, and the conversation goes everywhere except to the signal we sent and the choices it produced.

The Training That Does Not Train

In an ideal world, the teacher standing in front of fifty children in a leaking classroom would have been given training that prepared her not only for the content she is teaching but for the craft of teaching itself. She would have learned how children learn, which is a body of knowledge that has been developing for over a century and that has produced insights of genuine practical value. She would have practised the art of explanation, of questioning, of creating the conditions in which learning becomes possible for a roomful of children with different aptitudes, different backgrounds, different learning styles, and different relationships to the material. She would have been supervised and mentored and given feedback over years of practice until the craft became second nature.

This is not what Nigerian teacher training produces, in the main. The colleges of education and the universities that produce teachers for the Nigerian system are themselves under-resourced, under-staffed, and operating curricula that have not kept pace with developments in the understanding of how learning works. The practical component of teacher training, the time spent in actual classrooms under actual supervision with actual feedback, is frequently inadequate. The pedagogical theory that is taught is often not connected to the realities of the classrooms the graduates will enter. And the continuing professional development that good educational systems provide to teachers throughout their careers, the ongoing training, the communities of practice, the access to new research and new methods, is largely absent from the Nigerian system.

A teacher who has not been adequately trained and who receives no ongoing professional support is not failing because she is lazy or indifferent. She is operating at the limit of what she was given. And the response to this, in much of the Nigerian education conversation, is to demand better performance from the teacher without providing the conditions that better performance requires. This is not accountability. It is the performance of accountability. It identifies a gap in outcomes and assigns responsibility to the person closest to the outcome without examining the structural conditions that produced the gap.

Real accountability for teacher quality would begin with the institutions that train teachers and ask whether those institutions are providing training that is adequate to the task. It would ask whether the salaries being paid are sufficient to attract people who have the talent and the commitment that teaching requires. It would ask whether the professional development infrastructure exists to keep teachers growing throughout their careers. These are questions about systems and resources and political will. They are harder questions than the question of why that particular teacher in that particular school is not getting better results. They are also the questions whose answers would actually change things.

The Parent Who Calls at Eight in the Evening

I want to tell you about a specific dynamic that teachers in Nigerian schools describe with a consistency that makes it clearly not unusual. It is the parent who calls at eight in the evening to discuss their child’s performance. Not to ask how they can support the child at home. Not to share something about the child’s situation that might help the teacher understand a recent difficulty. To challenge. To question the grade given on the last assignment. To suggest, with varying degrees of directness, that the teacher has not given the child the attention and the preparation that the parent considers adequate.

The teacher who receives this call is at home. She has been on her feet since seven in the morning. She has taught multiple periods to large classes, managed the logistics of a school day in an under-resourced environment, marked work in whatever time was available, and is now expected to justify her professional judgment to a parent who was not in the classroom and did not see the work being done. The call is not, in most cases, coming from bad faith. It is coming from anxiety. From love. From the entirely understandable desire of a parent to do everything possible to secure their child’s future in a country where the future feels precarious and educational credentials feel like the only reliable insurance against that precariousness.

But the effect of the call on the teacher is not measured in intentions. It is measured in consequences. The teacher who is called at eight in the evening to defend her professional judgment is a teacher who is being told, in the most direct possible way, that her professional judgment is not trusted. That the parent considers themselves qualified to evaluate what she is doing and has found it wanting. That the relationship between parent and teacher is not a collaborative relationship between two people who both care about the child and who have different but complementary expertise, but a supervisory relationship in which the parent is the principal and the teacher is the contractor whose work is subject to review.

This dynamic, multiplied across thousands of schools and hundreds of thousands of classrooms, produces a teaching workforce that is demoralised in a specific way. Not the demoralisation of people who have given up. The demoralisation of people who have not given up, who still care, who come in every morning and try to do the work, but who have internalised the message that their professional judgment is not valued and have adjusted their behaviour accordingly. They teach to the examination because teaching to the examination produces the grades that satisfy the parents and generates fewer calls at eight in the evening. They do not take the creative risks that good teaching requires because creative risks sometimes produce lower test scores in the short term, and lower test scores produce calls at eight in the evening.

The system produces the behaviour that the system rewards, and the behaviour that the system currently rewards is safe, measurable, examination-oriented teaching that does not develop the capacities children actually need. Parents who challenge teachers at every turn are not causing this system but they are sustaining it, and the educational outcomes they are trying to improve are the first casualty of the dynamic they are creating.

What a Different Relationship Would Look Like

I am not arguing that parents should be silent. I am not arguing that teachers are above criticism or that every teacher is performing at the level the profession demands. I am arguing that the current configuration of the relationship between parents, teachers, and the educational system is producing outcomes that are bad for children, bad for teachers, and bad for the country, and that a different configuration is possible and necessary.

A different relationship would begin with a different understanding of what expertise teachers carry and why it deserves respect. Teaching is a skilled profession. It requires knowledge of content, knowledge of pedagogy, knowledge of child development, knowledge of how to manage the dynamics of a room full of children with different needs and different relationships to learning, and the practical wisdom to apply all of this knowledge in real time, under conditions of constant uncertainty, without the option of pausing to think. These skills are not obvious to people who have not practised them, in the way that the skills of medicine or engineering are not obvious to people who have not practised them. The parent who has been educated does not thereby understand how to teach. The parent who has been to school does not thereby know how classrooms work from the teacher’s side.

A different relationship would position the parent as a partner in the child’s education rather than as an auditor of the teacher’s performance. It would ask: what can I do at home that supports what is happening at school? What is my child struggling with and how can I help? What is my child’s relationship to learning right now and what does she need from me? These questions direct parental energy toward the home environment, where parents have genuine expertise and genuine authority, rather than toward the classroom environment, where the teacher has the expertise and the authority and where parental intervention frequently produces more confusion than clarity.

A different relationship would also require the state to do its part. The parent who is anxious about their child’s education because the public school system has consistently failed to deliver adequate outcomes is not being irrational. The erosion of trust in Nigerian teachers is not purely a cultural phenomenon. It is partly the earned consequence of a system that has produced poor outcomes for long enough that scepticism about teacher competence has become reasonable. Rebuilding that trust requires rebuilding the system. Paying teachers properly. Training them properly. Equipping their classrooms. Reducing class sizes to the point where differentiated teaching becomes possible. Giving teachers the professional autonomy to teach in ways that develop genuine capability rather than examination performance.

None of this is easy. All of it is necessary. And the parents who are most invested in their children’s education, who care most deeply about the outcomes, who are most willing to engage with the school, are exactly the people whose energy and attention and advocacy could, if directed at the system rather than at the individual teacher, produce the pressure for change that the system needs. The parent who calls the teacher at eight in the evening to challenge her grade is spending energy that could be spent demanding better pay for teachers, better training, better resources, better school infrastructure. That redirected energy would do more for that parent’s child than any number of evening calls.

The Teacher Nigeria Needs and the Conditions That Would Produce Her

Nigeria needs teachers who believe that their professional judgment matters. Who have been trained well enough to exercise that judgment with confidence. Who are paid well enough that the exercise of their profession is not conducted against a background of personal financial crisis. Who are respected enough by parents, administrators, and the broader society to take the creative risks that good teaching requires. Who are trusted enough to let a lesson follow a child’s curiosity when the curiosity appears, rather than pulling it back to the examination syllabus.

Nigeria needs teachers who know that if they try something new and it does not immediately produce better test scores, no one will call them at eight in the evening to tell them they are failing. Who know that their school administration understands the difference between a lesson that produced a memorable learning experience and a lesson that produced a high revision score, and values both. Who know that the parents of their students are on their side, are rooting for them, are asking how they can help rather than what they did wrong.

The country that produced this teacher would be a country that had decided its education system was about the development of human beings rather than the production of examination results. That is a decision that requires courage, because the examination results are visible and measurable and the development of human beings is slow and difficult to measure and does not appear in the school league table. But the country whose children learn to think, to question, to connect, to create, will outperform the country whose children learn to pass examinations in ways that no examination will ever capture and no league table will ever record.

The teacher is not the problem with Nigerian education. The teacher is the most underutilised asset in Nigerian education. She is a person of significant capability and genuine dedication who has been placed in conditions designed to produce mediocrity and then criticised for producing mediocrity. Changing that requires changing the conditions, which requires changing the conversation, which requires starting with the honest admission that in all our talk about fixing Nigerian education, we left the teacher out of the equation.

It is time to put her back in. At the centre, where she has always belonged.