Lagos, – The Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) on Wednesday said efforts were on to ensure full implementation of reading in the school curriculum for English nationwide.
NERDC’s Acting Executive Secretary, Prof. Ismail Junaidu, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.
According to Junaidu, research has shown that a large number of the country’s youths and children do not read but prefer fiddling with mobile electronic devices.
“I want to state that the gradual but steady extinction of the reading culture among our children today is becoming quite worrisome.
“There has been too much distraction especially among our youths.
“ The need to revive our reading culture in the country is no longer in contention if indeed we want to accelerate our quest for national development and transformation.
“That is why we have, in our basic education curriculum in English, entrenched the basic skills of reading, just to catch-them-young.
“We want to start catching-them-young by ensuring that they acquire and develop reading skills that would ensure that reading becomes an integral part of whatever they choose to be in future.
“Having said this, I equally think that parents have a huge role to play in ensuring that their children and wards are guided rightly,’’ he said.
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Junaidu also warned on the dangers of allowing academic labour unions such as the Academic Staff Union of Universities and the Nigeria Union of Teachers to embark on strikes.
“We might not see the after effect of such strikes immediately. It comes very much later when you might have forgotten the amount of damage that could have been done.
“We must all join hands together to change the way we think by ensuring that we do the right thing at the right time.
“As we know, we have a lot of natural and human resources that could be harnessed into great things.
“But all these things cannot come to be, if we fail to read,” the NERDC official said. (NAN)