Caleb V-C recommends Korean education system for varsities

By Dayo Adesulu

VICE Chancellor, Caleb University, Imota, Lagos, Professor Daniel Ayandeji Aina, has recommended that Nigerian universities should adopt the South Korea education system, stressing that it will boost the graduates’ qualities globally.

Aina who stated this during a media parley held in his office, said that South Korean embarks on mind education which we call value-based education in Nigeria, noting that teaching dignity of labour is pivotal in their institutions of higher learning.

He said: “South Korea emerged from the Korean War without natural resources, but a determined people who were ready to change the world. As a professor of engineering, you are only recognised by what you are professing and not by merely wearing suit and tie.”

Aina who said that a professor’s office is more in the laboratory with his overall on rather than wearing suit and teaching students using smart boards which we often do here. In Korean universities, he said, professors only wear suit during meetings; once that meeting is over they are back into the laboratory.

The vice chancellor who maintained that the Korean system is deeper and more practicable, explained that the idea is how what students learn in class can be turned to practical uses. He noted that their graduates don’t start looking for jobs, but start creating jobs before graduation. “This is the more reason Caleb University is collaborating with the Institute of Mind Education in Korea to adapt their methodology to our colleagues here that add value-based education. The Korean Educational International Youth Forum has linkages in about 90 countries that subscribe to it and Caleb University is now happy to be one.”

But what format does this education take? While explaining the format it would take, he said the Korean undergraduates are integrated into service education whereby they use what they acquired in classrooms as a form of community service. He said: “What we do in our NYSC here is that when people are posted to a place like Zamfara State, the person can then arrange with their local NYSC to wander away for months only to return and collect their certificates. But in the United States or South Korea, graduands are allowed to move to anywhere in the world to render service.”

That is why those societies are a lot better because they produce selfless individuals who are determined to help societal cause.”Also, while arguing that to get quality education is costly, the Vice Chancellor posited that at Caleb University, the situation is different.

He lamented that there have been arguments that private universities have come to supplant public institutions and dim the hope of the poor.

He said: “Some of those in the labour union carry all sorts of rumour that private universities are exorbitant because they felt that government allowing private universities to thrive will have a negative impact on their negotiation with government.

“For instance, our tuition in Caleb is N350,000, but when you look at our facilities, you will know it is not the N350,000 that we use in running the university. A cumulative salary of a professor before tax is between N380,000 and N500,000. So, if you have N350,000 tuition here that means a student fee cannot pay a professor in a month.

 

 

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