By Wale Ogunbanjo
Kudos to the Policy Makers
Nigeria’s education policymakers deserve recognition for the enormous effort that has gone into developing the National Policy on Education (NPE), the Basic Education Curriculum, and related implementation frameworks over the years. Coordinating educational policy in a country as large and diverse as Nigeria is no small task.
But even with a good curriculum, continuous improvement is essential. The current structure of basic education must be continually assessed to determine whether it is achieving its objectives as effectively as possible.
Why Raise the Issue?
My interest in this subject arose from personal experience. While assisting a young family member living with my family with his studies, I discovered that as a JS1 student, he was offering no fewer than fourteen subjects. That raised questions in my mind. Is this normal? Is it optimal? Is it sustainable?
That curiosity led me to consult the NPE and related curriculum documents.
What I found was interesting:
Primary 1–3 pupils may offer up to about 10 subjects
Primary 4–6 pupils up to 13 subjects
Junior Secondary School students up to 14 subjects
Policy Intent vs. Classroom Reality
The curriculum attempts to manage the load through clustering. Basic Science and Technology is meant to integrate Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Social Studies absorbs civics, geography, and economics basics. National Values is designed to fold in civic and moral education.
Despite this, many schools still treat the sub-components as separate classroom subjects. So, in practice, the child experiences them not as integrated learning areas, but as multiple standalone subjects requiring separate periods, assignments, textbooks, teachers, and examinations.
The Time Pressure on Students
The first casualty is time. Once thirteen or fourteen subjects are combined with assembly, breaks, recreation, movement between classes, and other activities, the school timetable becomes heavily congested. Students stay longer hours in school with less time for reflection, creativity, rest, and play.
Yet modern educational thinking increasingly recognizes that learning effectiveness is not simply a function of the number of subjects taught. Excessive fragmentation can reduce depth of understanding, while long hours in class can create mental fatigue.
Curriculum Must Match Resources
The second implication concerns teachers and resources.
A review of available data indicates that Nigeria’s basic education system is one of the largest in the world but with a severe shortage of qualified teachers.
In many public schools, classrooms remain overcrowded, while teachers are stretched across multiple learning areas beyond their specialization.
This raises a practical question: does the system realistically have the teacher capacity—in number and quality—to effectively deliver thirteen or fourteen subjects at the basic education level?
Every additional subject has implications:
more teachers,
more timetable periods,
more textbooks,
more lesson preparation,
more assessments,
and more classroom coordination.
Curriculum design must ultimately align with implementation capacity. A curriculum may be intellectually ambitious, but it must also be realistic. If the curriculum assumes ideal staffing conditions that do not exist in reality, schools are forced into coping mechanisms: rushed lessons, superficial teaching, fragmented learning, and excessive dependence on memorization rather than understanding.
The result is a paradox: we teach more subjects, yet many students still struggle with foundational literacy, numeracy, communication, and critical thinking.
That suggests the problem may not be insufficient curriculum content, but insufficient focus. Above all, the curriculum needs to be nimble.
The world is changing rapidly. Future employability increasingly rewards adaptability, communication, digital competence, and problem-solving rather than memorization across a wide range of disconnected subjects.
Are We Expecting Too Much from Schools?
This raises another uncomfortable but necessary question: have we tasked the school system with solving too many societal problems at once?
We appear to expect schools to singlehandedly produce morality, discipline, patriotism, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurship, religious values, civic consciousness, security awareness, creativity, and technological competence—all within an already overcrowded timetable.
But many of these attributes are shaped substantially outside the classroom by family structures, community culture, peer influence, media exposure, leadership examples, and the broader social environment.
Schools are important, but they cannot fully substitute for society itself.
What Should Basic Education Prioritize?
Perhaps the more important question is this: what should basic education prioritize above all else?
In my view, the core objectives should focus heavily on:
language and literacy,
numeracy,
effective communication,
digital literacy,
civics,
history,
and logic or critical thinking.
If these foundations are strong, students can more easily acquire specialized knowledge later.
The Textbook Burden
Another concern is the proliferation of textbooks. A heavy subject load naturally generates a heavy textbook load. Parents frequently complain not only about cost, but also about the frequency of curriculum and textbook changes. Editorial quality is often poor despite high prices.
Whether commercial interests around publishing have become too influential in curriculum expansion is a legitimate question deserving public scrutiny.
Need for Focus
The issue is not whether each current subject contains useful knowledge—most do. The real issue is whether the cumulative load is educationally optimal for the child, realistic for the teacher, affordable for parents, and sustainable for the nation.
The National Policy on Education speaks about nurturing the mind and creating a society capable of competing globally. That remains a noble aspiration.
The question is whether a more focused and streamlined curriculum may actually achieve that mission better.
Sometimes, in education as in engineering, effectiveness is not achieved by continuously adding more components, but by simplifying the system enough for the essential parts to work exceptionally well.
More, in education as in most things, is not necessarily the same as better.
© Wale Ogunbanjo May 2026
adewaleogunbanjo@yahoo.com
Victoria Island, Lagos