By
Ocho Simon
Secondary
School student and member of the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), Ajegunle
In
Ajegunle community of Lagos State, the Education Rights Campaign (ERC)- a
fighting organization that always without compromise campaign for free, quality
education for every citizen of the country - has deemed it fit to continue the
campaign in the rank and file of the poor people for adequate funding of
education by organizing this year’s edition of ‘Free summer coaching’.
Available
statistics from the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) shows that Nigeria
has literacy rate of just 66.6%, while UNESCO in their report also state that
any developing country/nation should budget at least 26% for education. The
reason for this is that education is the brain behind any country’s development
and civilization. Education helps to empower the human mind to explore the
material benefit of this world; but in the case of Nigeria education only a
back-cover page without any content.
Ajegunle
– a community of poor working class people and unemployed – proves the case for
adequate education funding. Many parents are unable to meet the basic needs of
their children including the ability to pay for the cost of coaching during the
annual summer holiday for school children.
As
part of activities to identify with daily struggle of the working people in the
community and promote their interest, this organization has been consistently
every year organized free coaching summer lesson usually organized for students
of SS I to SS III from within Ajegunle and its environ.
Within
the ten weeks or more of the holiday, the ERC free summer coaching will take
place for about six to eight weeks to intellectually keep students busy with
this initiative in the community by engaging them with learning academically,
socially for the benefit of enriching their life experiences in every fields of
life. Also, subjects like Art, Science,
and Commercial are taken to keep the students properly informed consciously.
Since
its inception, the ERC’s free summer lesson has always been applauded success by
the vast majority of the people living this community called ghetto. The 2011
recorded a huge plus where parents came to testify to the great work of the ERC
in keeping their sons and daughters engaged by telling the importance of
education and what basically education can do in human life both in thinking and
learning.
During
the 2011 free holiday lesson, there was career
and counseling which held every Friday and where topics were taken that
covers education, life, youth, crime and society etc in order to enhance
students’ experiences by bringing them to lime-light of enlightenment; and make
them see motives of why education shouldn’t be do-away-thing in their career
and life in the future.
In
this 2012 school vacation for students in the month of August to September, the
ERC is repeating the same exercise by organizing the free coaching holiday
lesson starting from August 6th in one of the primary school named
ANGLICAN PRIMARY SCHOOL in the Ajegunle ghetto community. And the time of the
lesson is 9am-1pm Monday to Friday. The free holiday lesson is part of the
activities of ERC to campaign for free and functional education
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