SAPIENTIA Journal of Philosophy

There are various global emerging issues such as flooding, desertification, global warming, hunger, disease, high unemployment, cybercrime etc. Every country or region has one problem or another to contain with. However, Nigeria as a nation has more than a challenge and perhaps the worst for her is unemployment that partly breeds hunger and insecurity. The unemployment is blamed on our current education system. Our education system, a product of defective curriculum inherited from the British colonial authority seen as Eurocentric has punctured our growth and development in many ways. The Eurocentric curriculum was to prepare people for white collar jobs. Today, the contemporary global market economy requires every nation to be part of the market by contributing its products and receiving from others in form of goods and services. Unfortunately, Nigeria cannot seriously be part of the new system, because curriculum then encouraged non-skills or what popularly referred to as ‘grammar’ education. Hence, even before Nigeria’s independence, graduates from different educational strata were produced and are still being produced mainly for white collar jobs. But the system has created a lot of challenges where our graduates appear no longer relevant in today’s economy, and by extension unemployable. Against this background it has become necessary to restructure the school curriculum to prepare our youths for the new wave of global development. The new curriculum would take into consideration the needs of individuals and the wider society, skills acquisition either in the vocational or technical would be appreciated for if public or private sectors would not employ graduates, individuals would create jobs for themselves and could as well become employers of labour. The curriculum requires restructuring from primary to tertiary levels with emphasis on vocational and technical skills. The paper uses historical and multidisciplinary approaches as methodology.

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