INTERNATIONAL DAY OF EDUCATION 2020
The United Nations marked the 24th of January as the official day to celebrate the role of education in human well-being, peace and sustainable development. The theme for 2020 is “Learning for people, planets, prosperity and peace.”
Education allows members of the society to realise their full potential, embrace creativity, reason critically and contribute immensely to the society. The ability to do basic arithmetics, read and write properly can open even those in absolute poverty to more enriching opportunities. This day and subsequent activities hope to reaffirm education as a basic human right.
At Eni Memorial High Calabar, our wonderful students celebrated this day in a variety of ways.
To begin, we received a talk from Dr Blessing Ntamu on Holistic Education, allowing our students to think about education beyond the classrooms, beyond facts and rote memorisation.
Education goes beyond progress tests and passing exams, it is a way of life. Proper education should encourage you to be curious, ask questions, think critically about everything and learn from your experience and the experiences of others. You should come out refined at the end of it.
A notable section of this talk was when she asked the students to project their lives 20, 30 years from now.
A female student piped up saying, “I want to be the wife of the president and an activist in underprivileged countries.”
Dr Ntamu laughed and replied, “Good but why don’t you be the president? In this era, women can be presidents.”
It served as a great reminder to us all about where society is going. Taking girls out of child marriages, off the streets and into school, empowering women to start businesses and help provide for themselves and their families, fighting for women’s rights and to end sexual harassment. These are all signs of a progressing society.
We had a JSS1 student present us with a slideshow on the importance of education, the challenges we face and solutions to these challenges. As a society we need to place more importance on well-rounded education, from inside our homes to the federal level, more resources and airtime need to be apportioned to education.
We were teased with some playful spoken word and stunned by a powerful monologue on the importance of education. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” We were presented with a very interesting drama following the lives of different children who were encouraged to go to school by their parents, some chose to go to school and some chose not to. The ones who chose not to ended up regretting their decision massively while the ones who chose to go ended up becoming useful and active members of the community.
Our JS3/SS1 students engaged in a well thought out and researched debate on whether homeschooling is better than going to a dedicated educational institution.
While both sides have their merits, we would always recommend going to an institution. Our major concern as education providers should be to give our students as much attention as is required for them to achieve their full potential; something we actively work on at Eni Memorial high.
Overall, the International Day of Education 2020 was a success. We got our students to think critically about why they're in school and what being educated really means for them and for the community.
Kudos Team EMH! #EducationDay
