Objectives:
- To expand the provision of secondary education in the sub-region.
- To reconceptualise and change the nature, form and content of
secondary education.
- To improve the quality of secondary education.
General
Philosophy
Secondary education and schooling have a multifaceted character:
- It is education for persons at a particular stage of human development
- adolescence. As such, it must cater to the personal developmental
needs of adolescents.
- It is education of a standard above that of the primary level.
That is, it assumes some mastery of basic functional standards in
several areas as preconditions for successful learning at this level.
- It is really intermediary education. That is, it can no longer
be considered terminal education for those who receive it. Secondary
education should be followed by tertiary education in specialized
fields or skills training for specific jobs in the labour force.
As such, secondary school leavers must either be fitted for further
education in a particular field or to be trained in some specific
skill area in the world of work. Accordingly, secondary education
must be of a general nature in a wide range of fields while facilitating
the initial stages of specialization based on individual aptitude,
achievement, interests and aspiration.
- It is schooling that can enhance and foster social cohesion and
solidarity on the one hand or deep social cleavages on the other,
depending upon how it is structured. Secondary schooling is an instrument
of fashioning the social order.
Taking into account this multi-faced character of education beyond
the primary level but before tertiary education and the world of work,
the approach adopted here is that education beyond the age of 11 or
12 years should be related to the developmental status of children.
The assumption is that in each chronological age cohort, there will
be children at different developmental stages. These stages can be
broadly defined as:
- Precocious or gifted in several areas, that is, developmentally
advanced relative to their peers.
- Normal , that is, children whose capabilities are considered standard
for that stage.
- Slow learners, or children who are developmentally lagged. These
children will achieve the same levels as the so-called normal children
but who can and will take a longer period, time, and require sympathetic
and supportive treatment from teachers and parents.
- Children who are developmentally challenged, disabled in one or
more areas so that they will not be able to do all that so-called
normal children do, even with supportive and sympathetic treatment
by parents and teachers.
There are three important qualifications to these assumptions.
- Categories overlap, they are not neat and mutually exclusive.
- All human being are possessed of multiple intelligences and
they overlap with all categories.
- Empirical studies and surveys are needed to give approximations
of the incidence of developmentally disabled students in any age
cohort. For example, the occurrence of severe malnutrition or rubella
could significantly alter the incidence of various developmental
disabilities in a specific cohort of children in a particular community
or country.
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