By Prof. Rasaki Ojo Bakare, FNAL
There is a fashionable but dangerous argument spreading in Nigeria today — that some courses are dead and should be scrapped from our universities. History, Philosophy, Classics, Religious Studies, Languages, Sociology, etc. — we are told they are useless and should give way to ICT, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. This argument is not only wrong; it is intellectually lazy and harmful to national development.
Knowledge is mightily elastic and monumentally wide! It is very dynamic, making curricula obsolete within a short period. But no knowledge is useless. No course is dead. What can die is the way we teach it. What should keep evolving is the curriculum.
Whenever America is in a war situation, it not only deploys soldiers and guns, it also deploys its historians, sociologists, musicians, linguists and language experts.
Every great nation was built on a balance of the technical and the humanistic. America did not abandon Philosophy to build Silicon Valley; Silicon Valley was built by philosophers who learned to code. China did not scrap History to lead in AI; it uses History to define its national purpose for AI.
A nation without History has no memory, without Philosophy has no compass, without Classics has no depth, without Languages has no identity. To produce a generation that can code but cannot think, that can build robots but cannot understand the complexities of its own citizenry, is to build tools without purpose.
The problem is not the courses; it is the curriculum. We inherited curricula designed to produce colonial clerks, not African problem-solvers. What we must do is not to kill the courses but to reform them to answer Africa’s socio-political and economic questions today.
In 2017, at the opening ceremony of a conference organised by the Faculty of Science in the university where I work, I charged my listeners to focus more on how to find solutions to the myriad problems that confront Nigeria. An elderly Professor of Pharmacy thought otherwise. He argued that his job is to teach and publish papers. Then, three years later, COVID-19 struck and the papers he published in Scopus couldn’t retard the spread, while their impact factors had no real impact on the sick and the dying. This kind of mentality is what should change.
History must move from memorising dates of the Berlin Conference to interrogating why our institutions fail and how our founding fathers managed diversity. Philosophy must move from abstract Western idealism to African ethics, governance, corruption and the philosophy of Omoluabi. Theatre Arts must directly solve the problems of Nollywood, impact the content industry and become soft power. Languages must become translation technology, cultural diplomacy and yield creative economy jobs.
Yes, we must urgently skill our students in ICT, AI and entrepreneurship. That is non-negotiable. But that skill becomes powerful only when it stands on deep human understanding. We need AI engineers who understand the Yoruba worldview to build voice assistants for our market women. We need coders who studied Sociology to design fintech the poor will trust.
Scrapping so-called dead courses will not make us modern; it will make us shallow and easily colonised again, this time digitally.
There are no dead courses. There are only dead curricula. What we need is reform, not removal.
Prof. Bakare- Scholar, Performing Artiste and Public Commentator writes from Ado-Ekiti.