The Federal Government (FG) has launched the first phase of a teacher education program to reintroduce history into basic school curriculum.
The announcement was made during an inauguration ceremony in Abuja on Thursday.
History was removed from the basic school curriculum during the 2009/2010 school year, causing outrage.
However, in March 2018, the federal government announced that the subject would be reintroduced.
Adamu Adamu, the minister of education, who was represented at the event on Thursday by Goodluck Opiah, the minister of state for education, expressed concern about the lack of history education for more than ten years.
He did, however, mention that 3,700 history teachers had been chosen for the first round of reintroduction training.
“History used to be one of the foundational subjects taught in our classrooms, but for some inexplicable reasons, the steam of teaching and learning was abolished,” he said.
“As a result, history was subsequently expunged from the list of subject combinations our students could offer in both external and internal examinations, compared to the subjects that were made compulsory at basic and secondary levels in Nigeria.
“This single act, no doubt, relegated and eroded the knowledge and information that learners could otherwise have been exposed to. It was a monumental mistake and we have already started seeing its negative consequences.
“The loss created by the absence of this subject has led to a fall in moral values, erosion of civic values, and disconnect from the past.
“More worrisome was the neglect of the teaching of this subject at basic and post-basic levels of education, which invariably eroded the knowledge of the evolution of Nigeria as a country.”
The focus of the reintroduction, according to the minister, is teacher training in order to improve capacity development.
According to Hamid Boboyi, executive secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), teacher selection was done on a pro rata basis, with 100 teachers selected from each state and Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
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