Early Childhood Training and Education Neglect and its Implication on Children’s Future Achievements, National Peace and Development: A Critical Review of Literature

Abstract

According to the National Policy on Education (2004), government is expected to take care of educational need of its younger citizens. Failure of Nigerian government to implement this section of the policy appropriately creates an avenue for the private proprietors/investors, who established and operated schools for monetary and economic interest. Thus, formal childhood training and education is beyond the reach of many parents who could not afford to pay high school fees being charged by the private schools proprietors/investors. Thereby, making these ‘poor’ parents end up in keeping their children away from schools. Consequent upon which, many of these younger citizens find ‘alternative’ ways of surviving. The paper revealed that these ‘abandoned children’, as young as they are, engage in different economic activities. In rural areas, they work in the farm as farm assistant; involving in planting, weeding, harvesting crops, tending livestock and apply chemicals to plants where applicable. In urban cities, they work as vendors/hawkers, shoe shiners, car washers, scavengers, beggars and housemaids. These made the children to be vulnerable to accident, violence, kidnapping and become ‘ingredients’ in the hands of ritualist, traffickers and sexual exploiters (which made them to be HIV/AIDS carriers). Thereafter, these younger citizens either become rapists, prostitutes, thugs, hooligans, pick-pockets, drugs addicts and peddlers, armed robbers’ or even hired killers, and thus, completely fit to be used as machinery in the hands of politicians to achieve their inordinate goals. Subsequently, these children (the hope and future of the nation!) constitute complete nuisance to ‘the state’ having discovered that ‘the state’ has truncated their destiny and that they are no longer useful for themselves. The paper, therefore, recommends that state of emergency should be declared in the education sector, where all stakeholders should meet to review the state of early childhood training and education. Government should also, adhere strictly to the United Nation 26% benchmark for education in the annual budget.

Keywords: Early Childhood Training and Education, Children’s Future, National Peace and Development