THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL INSIGHTS FOR EDUCATIONAL RELEVANCE IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Decades after the auspicious adoption of the National Policy on Education, Nigeria’s hope of developing by realizing her national goals, using education as a means, has remained an unmitigated illusion. A general feeling of disillusionment inevitably trails the nation’s education sector. Nettled by a miscellany of hamstring issues, the sector, unarguably, faces an untoward crisis of irrelevance to the national needs – as articulated in the national goals. This has wreckfully constricted the nation’s match to progress and national development since independence. With concern for the sector heightened in recent times, education experts and philosophers in the country are engaged in the debates on the best way to re-position the sector for maximum sense of relevance to the national development. This paper contributes to this important quest. Using Kingsley Price’s framework for ‘educational relevance and irrelevance’, it interrogates the Nigerian education system, identifying cases of its irrelevance to the national goals. The defective epistemic assumptions about the nature of knowledge and learning – which, unfortunately, undergird educational practices in the country – is identified as the root of the crisis to the nation’s educational relevance. As a way forward, the paper argues that incorporating insights from epistemology into education has the prospect of enhaning the cause of educational relevance in Nigeria. The paper adopts the expository, analytic and critical methods.