CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
This work provides the overview of the major underlying causes of secondary school dropout and its effects in some selected secondary school in Ovia North East local government area of Edo State, Nigeria. The subject is directly related to two benchmarks being addressed by many of Georgia’s country collaborative increase the percentage of students who graduates from school on time’ and “reduce the percentage of students absent 10 days or more from school annually”. The hope is that by understanding the underlying root causes of dropout in secondary schools and its key component a collaborative can examine relevant data for their local community and develop a comprehensive strategy that produces results.
In the ancient time, we have formal or traditional educational system which Nigerian’s or indigenous people used to educate their own children this is what has been called occupational education before the coming of the Europeans and their western education to Nigeria.
The purpose of this type of education was to make the young ones grow up in such a way that, they will understand the society into which they were born, acquired the knowledge, skill understand the attitude and appreciate the culture. However the general education sill have area of specialization which includes palm fruit, packing hunting, carpentering, etc.
As a result of the missionary activities in Nigeria, a formal type of education was established with the aim of training people who can read, understand and interpret the bible. The aim also was to produce people who would be of service too the member of the trinity of colonialism and church. The white-collar jobs which the formal education provided, made many citizen to attend schools, some of them did not complete their educational career due to economics, social and physical handicaps that will be exhaustively dealt with in subsequent chapters.
Every year a great number of students dropout of school due to some factors such as ill health, attitude of teacher and peer group influence. Those who drooped out of school constitute nuisance in the society. They can either be found roaming in the street or seeking for opportunity to steal. However a lot of these dropouts involves themselves in crimes and eventually end up in prison and in extreme cases executed for armed robbery offence.
The Georgia Academy defines school dropout as situation whereby students leaves school for one reason or the other without graduating, this bring a threat to him or her. Georgia academy believes that school is the right of every child even those in the rural areas of the localities. Since the mid 20th century many countries have discarded their previous selective schools systems, in which students early on were separated between academic and vocational tracks, in favour of more comprehensive schools. The effect of those reforms have generally been difficult to evaluate and their consequences for students educational and labor market outcomes remains disputed.
This work evaluates the effects of the introduction of a more comprehensive secondary school system in Nigeria in the 1990s. The reform reduced the differences between the academic and vocational educational tracks through prolonging and substantially increasing the academic content of all vocational tracks. The effect of this policy change are identified by exploiting a six year pilot scheme, which proceeded the actual reform in some municipalities. The result shows that the prolongation of the vocational tracks brought about an increased probability of dropping out of school among low performing students. Though one important motive behind the policy change was to enable all secondary schools graduates to pursue a university degree.