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FORMER First Lady of Oyo State and Ambassador of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Mrs Bukola Ladoja, has decried the poor reading and writing culture among the Nigerian children and has developed a strategy to address the problem.
Mrs Ladoja who is also the president and founder of Reading Awareness Society for Development in Africa (RASDA), called on the federal and state governments to develop strategies aimed at improving reading skills and creativity in the younger generation.
She spoke at the unveiling of her new reading campaign project tagged: ‘One Child, One Book, One Week’ in Abuja.
The project was launched during the annual conference of ANA.
She lamented that she had been to schools where senior secondary students were unable to spell their names correctly.
She said: “We are here for the Nigerian child; the children need a new orientation. We want to give them a foundation that will enable them to be useful to themselves and the nation at large.”
According to her, the project is for all the schools in the nation, be it public or private, saying “we urge everyone to be part of this project which is out to groom the younger generation.”
The ‘One Child One Book One Week is a pet project of Mrs Bukola Ladoja, and it is designed to ignite the reading fire among primary and secondary school students in Nigeria.
While stressing on importance of human capital development to nation-building, Mrs Ladoja noted that the project would go a long way in addressing the problems associated with lack of reading culture in Nigerian children and to train them on reading and comprehension skills.
Nigeria was rated by the World Culture Score Index as one of the countries in the world with the lowest reading culture.
The National Commission for Mass Literacy Adult and Non-Formal Education also projected that 38 percent of Nigerians are non-literate and that four out of 10 primary school children cannot read and comprehend.
Ladoja said these and many other issues call for intervention, maintaining, however,, that little is being done by the stakeholders in the education sector to correct the anomalies noting that reading cannot be said to have taken place without comprehension.
“Comprehension is an important skill that we must teach the children for them to be successful in their studies and life applications,” she said.
The former first lady further noted that studies had shown that reading; learning, and intelligence correlate with one another, stressing that the analytical skills that provide the ability to understand issues and solve problems are derived from constant reading.
She added that “regular reading brings about good mental health that enhances emotional intelligence and helps in self-awareness, empathy, social skills, and many other leadership skills.
“Therefore, the relationship between reading, knowledge acquisition, intelligence, and personal empowerment is important for nation building. Critical thinking and human development are lost when there is lack of reading,” she noted.
According to her, every participating school would be required to purchase different types of story books for each child in a classroom. “For instance, if there are 10 pupils in primary one, the teachers will order 10 different types of story books and the pupils will be exchanging the books on a weekly basis until each and everyone of them have read a minimum of 10 books in 10 weeks.
“Each book has its own moral lesson and every child will have moral value-mix. Different comprehension skills and strategies will also be applied per week to train the students for each book. We have tested these skills and strategies in our pilot project and the result is amazing”.
She noted Nigeria is full of problems now and need solution providers. “You cannot provide solution with an empty mind. You can only provide solution with heavy loaded mind with knowledge. We need people with well of knowledge that they would be bringing them out to solve the country’s problems.
“We are having social vices today and a lot of children are vision-less because nothing is in their mind, what I will call tabula rasa, an empty slate. However, we are saying that if their mind is loaded with knowledge such children won’t be involved in evil vices. They will be thinking what next; they will think positively, she stated.
Speaking on the age to inculcate reading culture on children, the Ex-Oyo First Lady said, from the beginning as soon as a child is enrolled in the Creche, noting however, that children should be taught in their mother tongue for proper comprehension in line with the National Policy on Education.
She also spoke on the need for training of teachers who are to deliver on the curriculum in the class, saying the government is spending trillions of naira on education from primary, secondary, and tertiary over the years, without achieving quality of education because adequate attention has not been given to the foundation as well training of,teachers at that level.
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