FG Reintroduces History In Basic Education Curriculum

13 years after it was eliminated from the basic education curriculum, the Federal Government has announced that history would once again be taught as a stand-alone topic.
According to the government, 3,700 history instructors have been chosen for the first round of training to improve their delivery of the subject.

At the flag-off ceremony for the reintroduction of the teaching of history and the preparation of history teachers at the basic education level on Thursday in Abuja, the minister of education, Adamu Adamu, bemoaned the threat to national cohesion as the nation retreated into primitive sentiments as a result of the lack of knowledge of Nigeria’s evolution as a result of history being removed from the basic education curriculum.

At the ceremony, which was attended by the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, and other significant players in the education sector, Adamu was represented by Minister of State for Education Goodluck Nanah Opiah.

Beginning with the school year 2009–2010, history was dropped from the primary and secondary curricula.

Adamu mandated the topic’s reappearance in 2019 in response to widespread criticism.

History used to be one of the core courses taught in our school, but for some mysterious reasons, the stream of instruction was discontinued.

“As a result, compared to the subjects that were made required at the basic and secondary levels in Nigeria, history was subsequently removed from the list of subject combinations our students could provide in both external and internal examinations.

“There is no doubt that this one action devalued and diminished the knowledge and information that students may otherwise have been exposed to. It was a grave error, and we are already feeling its effects negatively.

“The loss brought about by this subject’s absence has resulted in a decline in moral standards, a deterioration of civic norms, and a disconnection from the past. More concerning was the lack of instruction in this subject at the primary and secondary levels of school, which invariably reduced students’ understanding of the development of Nigeria as a country.

This had the immediate effect of making us lose all sense of even our recent past; we hardly saw ourselves as a nation and slowly started to revert to our primitive emotions.