CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

. Education has been traditionally thought of as the preparation, learning, acquisition of certain things because they will be useful. It is a preliminary to something more important to happen later on. Childhood is only a preparation for adult life, and adult life for another life. Also, the future, not the present has been the significant thing in education. Education is thought of also as something needed by some human being merely because of their interdependence on others. We are borne ignorant, unversed, unskilled, immatured and consequently in a state of social dependence. Instruction, training, and moral discipline are processes by which the adult gradually raises the helpless to the point where they can fend for themselves. The business of childhood is to grow into independence of adulthood, through the guidance of those who have already attained it.

As a father watches his young son crawl on the floor, trying to walk, he is filled with a desire to help him. The father flashily conceptualizes his transition from childhood and adolescence – to manhood. He then sees that the son will soon start living in society – the moment he start playing with age mates. His father tries to pass on to him, as he grows up, some practical workable philosophy of life. Those ideas he had believed, during his attempt to live a full and useful life – so as to enable the child live better with the boy next door, with the thousands in the city, with the millions in the country – and lo! With the billions in the wider world. And we hope that almost every parents will do the same. And we hope our children won’t hearing over and over again, the key to the disciplined, principled and successful life we have lived – and still live by it. According to Dr Nelson Gluech, speaking of his belief says: “There is no sense in my attempting ever to flee circumstances and conditions which cannot be avoided – but which I might bravely meet and frequently mend and often turn to good account. I know that half the nettle is won is I can face trouble with courage, disappointment with spirit, and triumph with humility. It has become ever clearer to me that the danger is far from disaster, that defeat may be the forerunner of final victory and that in the last analysis all achievements are perilously fragile unless based on enduring principle of moral conduct…I believe that my perplexities and difficulties can be considerably resolved if not completely overcome, by my own attitudes and actions …”.

Deep faith in God is necessary to keep me and hold mankind uncowed and confident under the vagaries and ordeals of moral experience, and particularly so in this period of revolutionary storm and travail. If our values receive their sanction and strength from relationship to divine law and acceptance of its ethical imperative then nothing can really harm us. “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want”.