Prof. Dantani Wushishi, the Registrar and Chief Executive Officer, National Examinations Council (NECO), has urged stakeholders to prioritise moral education to address social and security challenges bedevilling the country.
Wushishi made the call on Tuesday during the maiden National Conference of Education, organised by the Faculty of Education, Federal University Kashere (FUK), Gombe State.
The theme of the conference is: “Emerging Innovations for Curtailing Contemporary Challenges and Issues in Education Practice,”
Wushishi said that for education to be useful and impactful on the society, there was the need for stakeholders to prioritise moral values towards ensuring the sustainable development of the country.
He described education as a tool that must be gainfully utilised to produce manpower with the requisite knowledge, skills and competencies to drive the country’s quest for sustainable development and increased national prosperity.
According to him, education is at the heart of all national development efforts, hence, the need to leverage it to proffer solutions to the challenges facing the country.
He opined that education that adds no value to the society was no education, stressing that moral education was critical to address the behavioural ills exhibited by some individuals to cause mayhem in the society.
“We all must help develop individuals with sound morals because it is now a challenge to education.
“In recent times; we now have educated people as kidnappers, criminals and internet fraudsters because they lacked the needed moral values to be patriotic and contribute positively to national development,” he said.
While identifying malpractice as a challenge that needed to be addressed, Wushishi said that the Commission under his watch was already leveraging modern technologies towards curbing examination malpractices.
The NECO boss expressed concern over the attitude of some parents who encouraged their children to engage in examination malpractice, noting that such attitude would not encourage the child to do the right thing.
According to him, NECO will continue to go tough on all forms of examination malpractice and ensure that the moral integrity of the body was upheld for the benefit of national development.
In his remarks, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Prof. Umar Pate described the conference as a veritable tool to share experience and ideas.
Pate said that the conference would help make “functional, prescriptive and solution-oriented recommendations” that could be utilised by policy makers and interested parties to effect positive change in the country.
He said the unversity was working hard to train its students on the right morals to enable them to pcontribute to national development
He added that FUK had always insisted on ethics, values and standards that are acceptable internationally to ensure that students of the institution remained good ambassadors wherever they go.
The VC called on students and all stakeholders to embrace Information and Communication Technology (ICT) towards addressing the emerging challenges in the education sector.
Pate hinted that the institution was already discussing with National University Commission (NUC), to run part-time courses in education.
Earlier, Prof. Auwal Abdulhamid, the Dean of the Faculty, said with the negative impacts of COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that education sector now faces a new kind of challenge.
“So we are having this conference bearing in mind how COVID-19 shutdown the education system worldwide.
“The conference will help us strategies on how to teach our students under whatever circumstances and situation,” he said.
NAN
