By Lasisi Olagunju, May 18, 2026
“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” — Aristotle.
The Ass in the Lion’s Skin is Aesop’s story of a donkey who finds a lion’s skin abandoned in the forest. He wears it and begins to terrify other animals who mistake him for a lion. Delighted by the fear he inspires, the ass grows bold and starts roaming everywhere with counterfeit majesty. But one day, unable to contain himself, he brays. The sound betrays him instantly. The animals discover that beneath the lion’s appearance stood only a donkey. Soon, he becomes food for the real majesties of the forest.
The moral is timeless: appearances and shortcuts cannot substitute for substance.
At the top of this page, Aristotle urges society to honour teachers, but he attaches a condition to that honour: they must “educate well.” In that single adverb — “well” — lies the entire question of quality. If you teach, teach well. But how does one teach well after escaping the rigours that produce good teachers?
Education minister, Tunji Alausa, some days ago announced that candidates seeking admission into Colleges of Education would no longer be required to sit the UTME. Under the new policy, applicants need only four SSCE credits; no competitive entrance examination. The only other requirement is registration with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). The decision marks a sharp departure from the previous system in which all tertiary institution candidates sat the UTME.
I was reading Luther Sheeleigh Cressman’s ‘The Teacher: An Old Tradition and a New Obligation’, published in November 1930, and came across a striking description of the teacher in antiquity. The teacher, he wrote, was “the one who led the boy and in so doing led him to know what life expected of him.” He was the guide who passed down to the young the values of society and helped them make sense of the world around them.
Now what makes a teacher?
Not all who wear the masquerade’s mask are ancestors. The mask alone does not make the spirit; authenticity matters. A teacher who lacks knowledge of what he teaches, who teaches nonsense, is no teacher at all. Nigeria’s education policy has long produced such teachers. Now, it has embarked on a more ambitious journey: to manufacture the appearance of access while quietly weakening the substance of standards.
I spoke with old and young friends teaching in universities and colleges of education. They all agree that teacher education is the bedrock of a nation’s overall development. “A nation cannot rise above the quality of its teachers,” one of them, an old schoolmate, lamented. He was right.
A nation may celebrate rising admission figures and boast that barriers have been removed, but if the intellectual gatekeeping that guarantees quality is dismantled, the system eventually betrays itself, just as the donkey’s bray exposed him.
Minimum JAMB admission scores are now 150 for universities, 100 for polytechnics and effectively zero for colleges of education. Some private universities are even pushing for 80. Their argument is that they would patch up the poverty of the intakes later. But what kind of system does that and still expects to stand?
The Yoruba have a proverb: Iyawo bẹ́ẹ̀ bẹ́ẹ̀, ọmọ bẹ́ẹ̀ bẹ́ẹ̀ ni í bí fún ni — the wife you marry as “manage” will produce “manage” children. A marriage consummated in patchwork will produce patchwork offspring. Computer scientists call it “garbage in, garbage out.”
The irony is painful. The teacher stands at the foundation of national progress and development. Every professional who preens in personal or collective success first passed through the hands of a teacher. To dilute the entry threshold into teacher education, therefore, is to tamper with the roots while hoping the branches will flourish.
What, if I may ask, are the ultimate goals of this policy? To produce more teachers without substance? The irony is painful: the Tinubu government’s mantra is ‘Renewed Hope.’ But what hope lies in a policy whose disaster is already predictable? Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, wrote in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: “When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings, there’s no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something.”
But our husbands in power insist that these measures are necessary to save the system from collapse. The colleges, they say, must have students. They must destroy the system in other to save it.
The whole scenario resembles a Yoruba tale explaining the monkey’s sunken eyes. Dissatisfied with the arrangement of her child’s eyes, monkey’s mother tried to adjust them. In the process, she pushed them too far inward into their sockets, and the deformity became permanent.
That is often what we do with public policy here: in the name of reform, we destroy the very thing we claim to improve. It is the danger of misguided correction — an attempt to fix a problem that ends up worsening it irretrievably.
By abolishing the UTME requirement for colleges that train teachers, and by lowering entry standards into education faculties in the universities, the government has effectively weakened the gate into the profession responsible for producing every other profession including the ‘golden’ ones.
There is another Aesop fable that speaks directly to this logic. It is the story of the farmer whose hen laid golden eggs.
Impatient with the slow but steady reward, the farmer concluded that if one golden egg came each day, then a treasure must surely be hidden inside the bird itself. In greed and foolish haste, he killed the hen, only to discover that it was no different from every other hen. In trying to get more, he destroyed the very source of his wealth.
That is the tragedy of teacher education in Nigeria. In the desperation to fill classrooms, the country is destroying the very standards needed to produce competent teachers that will produce tomorrow’s wealth.
Removing the entry gate to teacher training schools sends a troubling message: that teaching no longer requires rigorous intellectual preparation. Instead of attracting bright and committed young people into education, the government has confirmed an old social prejudice — that Colleges of Education are refuges for academic rejects. Rather than pull the system back from free fall, government may have pushed it further toward the cliff’s edge.
The cliff is a hair’s breadth from disaster. A nation that weakens the process of producing teachers should not be surprised when ignorance multiplies in its classrooms and mediocrity parades itself as national leadership. Take a look at the quality of some of the persons in charge of your country. Who were their teachers? You would want to know.
A very senior professor heard the minister, and, with a very heavy heart, fired a message to me: “You have the language… Please can you address this new policy (announced by the Minister of Education) of no entrance exam to study at the College of Education? Already, the quality of output is incredibly poor as only those who could not make the grades are being admitted to Education. Yet, these are the people that will be teaching in our schools. Please, what is wrong with us?
“As vice chancellor, in my fourth year, I insisted that only those who applied for programmes in Education would be admitted to the university’s Faculty of Education and not those who failed to meet the grades in other courses. We cannot afford to afflict our children with people who only found themselves in Education because they could not make the grades elsewhere. It is worse now; they do not have to write any exam again to enter.”
Leading me by the hand, the professor showed me statistics from the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). Between 2015 and 2019, JAMB statistics reveal the depth of the crisis confronting Nigeria’s Colleges of Education. In 2015, the institutions had a carrying capacity of 215,397 students, yet only 18,722 candidates applied, representing just 8.69 percent of available spaces. Admissions stood at 74,555, which was only 34.61 percent of approved quota.
The pattern continued in 2016. Although the carrying capacity rose to 248,446, applications dropped to 18,365, amounting to only 7.39 percent of quota. Admissions also declined proportionately to 71,554, representing 28.80 percent of available spaces.
In 2017, the carrying capacity expanded dramatically to 365,392. However, applications increased only marginally to 35,905, or 9.83 percent of quota, while admissions stood at 74,165, representing just 20.29 percent utilisation of capacity.
The situation worsened in 2018. Out of a carrying capacity of 390,685, only 24,525 candidates applied, amounting to a mere 6.28 percent. Admissions dropped further to 59,366, representing only 15.19 percent of quota.
By 2019, the carrying capacity had climbed to 403,225, yet applications remained critically low at 34,138, or 8.47 percent of approved spaces. Admissions rose slightly to 69,610, but this still accounted for only 17.26 percent of total capacity. Between 2019 and now, the figures have remained embarrassingly tragic.
What we have above exposes a stark reality: Nigeria’s Colleges of Education are overwhelmingly under-subscribed. Who, with both eyes open, would invest money, years and a future in schools whose certificates command so little worth? At no point within the five-year period did applications reach even 10 percent of approved quota, while admissions never exceeded 35 percent of carrying capacity.
My professor engaged me. He pointed to statistics on university undergraduates studying Education. The figures suggested that many admitted candidates were not originally interested in the discipline but were redirected into it simply because spaces existed there.
We spoke and agonised over the situation.
But what can we do? We may have wisdom, but we do not have power (àwa l’ó l’ogbón, a ò l’ágbára). Fuji musician, Ayinde Barrister, sang that more than forty years ago.
My professor and I agree that those who want to read teacher education should actually have the highest scores in UTME with other loose ends tightened. But who would want to go through all the trouble and graduate into joblessness and poverty?
There is a reason why some other courses are very competitive. We all know the reason: some assurance of good life after the rigours of school life. Teaching on the other hand is burdened by low prestige, by poor remuneration and absence of social respect. How many of today’s teachers teach out of choice? A society that recruits reluctant minds into teaching should not expect inspired learning in its schools. Reluctant teachers will teach to fail.
Many candidates entering Colleges of Education today do so not out of passion but out of disappointment. They are often students who could not secure admission into more competitive programmes. Now, dismantling the little barrier of selection into the colleges won’t make the schools attractive to candidates of value.
The teacher is the quiet manufacturer of civilisation. A nation desperate for greatness cannot, therefore, afford to lower the gate into the teaching profession. If it does, as we do, the consequence is predictable: Badly trained teachers turn out weak in the classroom; weak teachers inevitably produce weak pupils, and weak pupils eventually become weak professionals, and weak leaders who produce weak institutions. The crisis multiplies across spheres, sectors and, even generations.
This is why the issue goes beyond education policy. It is about national survival.
In Aesop’s story, the farmer believed he was solving a problem. He thought he was accelerating prosperity. Instead, he destroyed the source of it. Nigeria is making the same mistake in its approach to teacher education with its choice of convenient quantity over quality.
An old teacher told me that “the temptation of governments everywhere is to pursue numbers: more admissions, more enrolment, more institutions, more certificates.” But, he said, education is not a factory for producing paper qualifications. It is the cultivation of minds. And cultivation requires standards.
So, what do we do? What Nigeria needs is not the dilution of teacher training but the elevation of the teaching profession itself. Bright students will not aspire to become teachers unless the profession is respected, properly rewarded and intellectually competitive. No self-respecting person will rush to go to gateless Colleges of Education unless they cease being waiting rooms for rejected university candidates.
What the government decided, and which the minister announced, was pure, painful irony: we complain daily about collapsing standards in our schools and we thought weakening the process of producing teachers is the solution. It is like diagnosing a sick person and poisoning their meal.
Eyo Ita was Leader of Government Business, Eastern Region of Nigeria. Nnamdi Azikiwe took over from him as premier in 1954. In 1948, Ita wrote about what he called “the vanishing race” of teachers and “the paradox of the undervaluation of the teacher.” Few people, he said, regarded the teacher as a significant part of “the wealth of the nation” in the same way they valued minerals and cattle, capital and tools of production, and other “raw” materials of culture. Yet, he argued, the teacher is “the soul of the people, the conscience of the race, the guardian of the spirit, and the shaper of destiny.”
Ita added that the teacher’s “shrine is so high and so far removed from the realistic world of flesh and blood, of yam and corn and clothes and shelter, that people usually forget about the teacher himself, except for brief moments.
“If the Nigerian teacher would sharpen his skill and strengthen his economic power; his profession would become more respectable and enviable; his economic power and social position would prevent him from being treated as a mere sport or worthless tool of politicians.” He warned that failure to integrate the teacher into the flux of life had “deprived the earth of its salt.”
Ita wrote those words 78 years ago. Twelve years later, Nigeria gained independence. Sixty-six years after independence, it is tragic that all the country can think of is to improve the teacher’s condition by debasing their work and diminishing them.
Lasisi Olagunju is a renowned columnist with Nigerian Tribune
