For the purpose of this paper, knowl­edge society and knowledge econo­my will, as terms and concepts, be deployed quite fluidly and defined as ‘a knowledge-driven economy’ (in which) the generation and exploitation of knowledge play the predominant part in the creation of wealth’ (UK Department of Trade and Industry, 1988). The fact is that in the developing world nowadays, over 60 per cent of workers are knowl­edge workers, who contribute remarkably to the GDP of their countries. While the case is not true with us in Nigeria today, where the movement from an agrarian economy to the industrial civilization is both slow and shy, there is an increasing need to translate, through frog-jumping from a slow industrialization process to a knowledge-driven society.
As we know, in pre-industrial society, economy depended on acquiring such knowledge as essential for subsistent meth­od of farming; how to carry out subsistent farming, build and manufacture. This is basic knowledge, which did not anticipate nor provide for mass or massive produc­tion; issues of storage capacity, transmit­ting large quantities of information cheaply has increased at a dizzying speed in recent times. As graphically captured by Profes­sor Luc Weber (2008), we live in a ‘global knowledge driven world’ where ‘distance is no longer a constraint, information is global, immediate and participative, with increased interdependence and collective effort driv­ing innovation. We shall dwell on this a little later in the lecture.
Economic growth in modern society comes/ is impelled and driven by Science and Technology, alongside the new addi­tion of Innovation. This is in favour of the advancement of well-being and social health of society. The key challenges that confront the twenty-first century is the eradication of poverty, job creation and sustained upping of the wealth of the populace. Beyond slogan­eering, the vision, or better still, the dream of government people for Nigeria is to make Nigeria one of the leading 20 economies of the world. It is clear from the indicators of those societies that have attained the devel­opment status that such a desire will remain at the level of a pipe-dream, except it is fath­omed on the promotion of science, technol­ogy and innovation as a matter of core and priority policy, one that will be strategized for implementation. To drive this aspiration, the nation’s capacity has to be strengthened through science, with strategies put in place for innovation and its management so that job creation will be enabled and poverty will be drastically reduced, if not totally eradicat­ed, which should be the pursuit of all people of imagination.
The education sector: Histo­ry, structure and character
After 54 years of independence, the struc­ture and quality of education in Nigeria, and at all levels, remain on shaky grounds. This is not because of observable deficit in edu­cational policies; policies abound in surplus. It is the consistent inconsistency at the level of educational policy implementation that plagues the sector in a nation whose govern­ment harbours the laudable but dream-like ambition of squaring up with the greatest twenty economies in the world in less than a decade hence, and in a global arrange­ment that is ruled by knowledge as the criti­cal premise of economic development and growth. As in all other sectors of the coun­try’s economy, education continues to re­ceive inadequate attention both at the level of governmental perception and budgetary disbursement.
In spite of this discomfiting status of edu­cation in Nigeria, there are a few variables, features and landmarks that characterize and have defined, and define the educational culture and system before and since inde­pendence. These have to be put in a fitting discourse context in this Lecture, not neces­sarily to re-narrate the historical foundation and development of the Nigerian educational system, which has been amply carried out by eminent Nigerian educationists and histori­ans and educational Reports, long ago.
Education is pronounced free but is yet to be made compulsory at any level, in spite of UBE. Secondly, after nursing varying and various options, the formal education system is structured into nine years of basic, techni­cal and vocational learning, (six years of pri­mary school and three years at the junior sec­ondary school level) as pupils were expected to complete these first before proceeding on a career path in the next three years of sec­ondary education, and a minimum of four years of university education leading to a Bachelor’s degree in most disciplines. While the modification of the 6-3-3-4 system of ed­ucation to 9-3-4 is still being contested, there was another proposal by the immediate past Minister of Education for a shift to 1-6-3-3-4 system of education.
Another observably constant feature of the educational system is at the level of owner­ship. Primary education is administered and controlled by the Local Governments. Sec­ondary schools are run by the State Govern­ments, with the exception of the controversial “Unity Schools” which the Federal Govern­ment administers. Tertiary institutions are owned by the Federal and states govern­ments while, recently, private institutions, corporate bodies, religious institutions and wealthy individuals, procure licenses to run tertiary institutions. Ordinarily, the school calendar at the primary and secondary lev­els run for ten months in three terms, while the Higher education system runs in two se­mesters, and should normally last for nine months but as a result of industrial tussles between government and the academic staff unions, some sessions run into years, or in­deed get cancelled in extreme circumstances.
We have observed above that there is no paucity of educational policy in Nigeria. In addition to the poorly implemented policies, the government continues to introduce series of reforms in the educational sector- some de­riving from the educational policies and oth­ers from the whims of the prevailing authori­ties of the centre. For instance, the federal government brought about and implemented a series of important reforms between the de­cade 1980s and 1990s. These reforms have significant implications for the form, struc­ture and content of Nigerian educational system. First, there is the sharp departure from the British educational structure and system at the secondary school level which operated the GCE ‘O’ Levels, followed by a two-year GCE ‘A’ Level, run mainly through the Higher School Certificate programme. This structure, which many now look back to with great nostalgia as it was considered ex­tremely effective, has been substituted with the three years of junior secondary and three years of senior-secondary structure. As a re­sult, the GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels have largely been phased out, and replaced by the Junior School Certificate, Senior School Certificate and Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examina­tion. The curricular have also transformed beyond its academic content to embrace vo­cational courses and streams, such that grad­uates from junior secondary school have the options of moving on into any one of one of the following: 1) senior secondary school; 2) technical/vocational college; and 3) teacher training college..
In addition to these reforms, and for the purposes of bench-marking and minimum standard propulsion, accreditation has been introduced at the tertiary level. There is also an intensive drive to centralize, if not unifor­matize, higher education for effective con­trol by the National Universities Commis­sion, whose original role, at inception, was to midwife the institutions for government, mainly as a clearing house. The effects of all these reforms are yet to be fully ascertained or evaluated.

Education: Nigeria in a knowledge economy (2)