The Federal Government on Thursday announced the reintroduction of History as a stand alone subject in the basic education curriculum in Nigeria.
This is coming 13 years after it was abolished. History was removed from primary and secondary education curriculums from the 2009/2010 academic session.
Education Minister Adamu Adamu said national cohesion was being threatened with the country retreating into primordial sentiments because of lack of knowledge about the evolution of Nigeria following the removal of History from the basic education curriculum.
Consequently government said 3,700 History teachers have been shortlisted for the first round of training for enhanced teaching of the subject.
Adamu who was represented by the Minister of State for Education, Goodluck Nanah Opiah, said: “History used to be one of the foundational subjects taught in our classroom. But for some inexplicable reasons, the stream of teaching and learning was abolished.
“As a result, History was subsequently expunged from the list of subject combinations our students could offer in both external and internal examinations compared to the subjects that were made compulsory at basic and secondary levels in Nigeria.
“This single act no doubt relegated and eroded the knowledge and information that learners could otherwise have been exposed to. It was a monumental mistake and we have already started seeing its negative consequences.
“The loss created by the absence of this subject has led to a fall in moral values, erosion of civic values, and disconnect from the past. More worrisome was the neglect of the teaching of this subject at basic and post basic levels of education, which invariably eroded the knowledge of the evolution of Nigeria as a country.
“The immediate implication of this was that we lost ideas, even of our recent past, and we scarcely saw ourselves as one nation and gradually began retreating into our primordial sentiments.”
The minister added that the training and retraining of teachers to enhance their capacity would lead to the mastery of the subject would be a focus of the reintroduction.
