Abstract
This study is on impact of secondary school vocational curriculum on socioeconomic empowerment of youth. The total population for the study is 200 staff of selected secondary schools in Ekwusigo LGA of Anambra state. The researcher used questionnaires as the instrument for the data collection. Descriptive Survey research design was adopted for this study. A total of 133 respondents made principals, vice principals adm, senior staff and junior staff was used for the study. The data collected were presented in tables and analyzed using simple percentages and frequencies
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
- Background of the study
Education is described as the totality of life experiences that people acquire, and which enables them to cope with and derive satisfaction from living in the world (Babafemi 2007). This is said to enable people achieve social competence and optimum individual development. It is on this premise that it is believed that the quality of a nation’s education is proportional to the level of its prosperity. Economically, advanced nations of the world are distinguished by the excellence of their educational system.
Following the political independence of Nigeria, there was a realization that the type of education our colonial masters left with us needed a critical re-examination of the worth: of content, objectives, relevance, methods, administration, evaluation, and so forth. According to Ezeobata (2007), this period saw a state of affairs in Nigerian education where every subject had to prove its usefulness’ to retain a place in the school curriculum. This was said to have led the then National Educational Research Council (NERC) to convey a historic curriculum conference at Lagos in 1969. This conference recommended new set of goals and provided directions for major curriculum revision upon which the National Policy on Education of 1977 and the revised policy in 1981 and 2004 were based. Against this background of national aspirations, a new educational system commonly referred to as the 6-3-3-4 system of education emerged. The system consisted of six years of primary school education, three years of Junior Secondary School (JSS), and three years of Senior Secondary School (SSS) and four years of post-secondary education (Omotayo, Ihebereme, & Maduewesi, 2008).
In his own work, Adebayo (1998) stated that vocational education can assist Nigerians to acquire the necessary skills and competence for occupation. He also observed that, from time immemorial, vocational skills and abilities were passed from one generation to the next. He also listed such skills to include: fishing, hunting, weaving, carving etc. He also said that, the outcome of training people vocationally could be rewarding and satisfying, since it could improve the living conditions of the citizens through the vocational education received. Therefore, this means that technical and vocational education is a powerful tool that librates, transforms people into self-reliant humans and empowers them economically.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The government in her bid to reduce unemployment and improve on the socio-economic empowerment of youths in Nigeria, introduced a new curriculum in the senior secondary school with effect from the 2011 academic year. The goal of the new curriculum is geared towards wealth creation, entrepreneur development and skill acquisition training for self-employment. Under the present structure, the curriculum has been designed to cover courses such as office practice, insurance, commerce, store management and financial accounting. By the expansion of the business subject curriculum, this has added additional workload on the business teachers as well as business subject students. Problems assumed to constitute constraints to the functionality of business subjects’ curriculum towards socioeconomic empowerment of youths includes; inadequate teaching methods, lack of equipment/infrastructural facilities and inadequate proportion of specialist teachers available in Ekwusigo l.g.a. Anambra state. The above impediments accounted for the reasons why this study is carried out.