Historical Obituary: In remembrance of a decade-plus death of history in Nigerian school curriculums

I find it liberatingly exciting to read the history of things, culture, places, and ideologies. One of the tools of freedom you can give to a people is to understand in entirety where they came from and the complexions of their evolution. People who understand history don't fight mosquito wars with guns. They speak from a place of understanding. Their minds are broad enough to predictably peep into the future, iterating the resources needed for progress and roadblocks to avoid.I remembered vividly how Mr Adedeji, my social studies teacher in primary school, taught us about the amalgamation of the southern and the northern protectorate of Nigeria in 1914 and the name of Frederick Lord Luggard came up in the conversation. This particular class led me to check my dictionary when I got home that day, and I checked two words, "amalgamation" and " protectorate". I must say that those two words introduced me to an endless search for knowledge on Nigeria's colonial history and what we used to be as people before this present Nigeria.I would not know who slept and woke up as a leader in Nigeria's education leadership in 2007 and decided that "History" would no longer be part of Nigeria's primary and secondary education. This singular act alone is a sign of historical dementia on the part of the leaders. While reading about why they removed history from school curriculums, I came across one of their reasons, " Most history graduates don't get jobs and students are not showing interest in learning history in schools".I searched deeper to see if there was any data to back up such a claim but none. Are history graduates the only graduates without jobs?. The importance of history is not first of all for a career in history but to hand over gems of the past to the next generation. It is the responsibility of the education leadership in Nigeria to ensure that the history profession blossoms and is guarded jealously because that is the only lens to the past that we have as a people.We have robbed at least five generations of Nigerians for over a decade in learning about their history. We continually have a generation of young Nigerians who know more about the Kardashians than Obafemi Awolowo, Festus Okoti-eboh, or Dele Giwa. We constantly see young Nigerians who now quote social media sources as their fact in conversations. We now have a generation that cannot have proper developmental conversations because they lack the depth of historical facts and willpower of intellectual analysis. What the scrapping of the history curriculum has done is to amplify the belief of the younger generation that everything historical is "old school", and they will easily discard anything that has no "hash-tag" as "old school".Revolutionaries such as Ken Saro Wiwa fought for his people because they understood the history of the Ogoni people. The younger generation romanticizes some oppressive systems because they don't understand history. We deny the next generation to break free from shackles of intellectual slumber if we deny them the opportunity to learn history. Whether we call history old school or not, we stand a significant loss by not teaching the next generation about their past.The conversation continues.Oluwaseun David ADEPOJU