Dollar Diplomacy; 4; Nigeria: A School for Jacob

WGBH, dollar diplomacy Nigeria, show number four, take one. The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. This is the fourth program in a series on United States foreign aid, dollar diplomacy. Jacob Agibola is twelve years old.

His home is Ayaturo Nigeria. Jacob has a new school. One of many new schools in Nigeria paid for in part by United States dollars. Gary Rose is twelve years old. In Paine Gap, Kentucky, he walks to school, does chores, shares one classroom with fourteen other students, grades five to eight. The future is cradled in the hands of boys like these. Jacob is the hope of his country. Gary is the future of powers. What are we doing for Jacob? What are we not doing for Gary? There is both an answer and a dilemma in a school for Jacob. This town is to Jacob.

What home is to any boy? His friends are here, his playmates. It is here his mother works as a trader in the market. It is from here each morning, his father goes to work as county supervisor of roads. His sisters and brothers walk these streets each morning to work or to elementary school. There are no strangers in Jacob's town. He knows the shopkeepers, the women who cook food and sell in their one man restaurants. He knows the carpenter and the graves of the town elders. It is a hot, tropical town in rural Nigeria. It is traditional, it is comfortable, it is home. But it is changing. English rule has left its imprint. Most obvious, English is the common language of trade and commerce and even government.

Jacob's run to a new school will show him and his country a bigger world of industry, of technology, of society organized on a national level, rather than a tribal level. It will lead him away from the comforts of home, family, friends and accustomed ways in the remote village of Ayataro and lead him into the 20th century. This is true of Jacob, it is true of his country, Nigeria. English colonial territory until five years ago, 45 million people, Muslim and Christian, disparate tribe seeking unity through democratic representative government. Jacob's striving represents Nigeria's and Nigeria's problems are those of emerging Africa. Not the least of these is the problem of utilizing the talents of the people, of developing the human resource. To develop the human resource is the reason for the Ayataro comprehensive secondary school opened two years ago.

It was partially financed by more than two million United States dollars, partially staffed by teachers from the states. Mr. B.J. Ojo, Nigerian principal of the school, leads a prayer and assembly at the beginning of each day. After assembly, Jacob is off to a day of classes, new math, shop, English class, which is the second language of each of these children and required as the basic language in all classes. It's a full day for Jacob, it's a full day for his teachers. Spencer McDonald heads the American group, he and a dozen other American teachers are here under a contract between AID and Harvard University. The agency for international development, AID, hires groups with special skills like universities

to do some AID jobs overseas. In this case, Harvard provides Ayataro with personnel from its own Department of Education. American teachers are also recruited from public and private schools. My specific task in the school aside from the administration for the Harvard group here serve as a curriculum coordinator for the entire school operation. The principal could be regarded as a counterpart for me. We have 35 staff members at the present time of whom 11 are members of the Harvard team, some of the Nigerian staff members, and then we have some other expatriate personnel, gentlemen from India, who teaches biology, three people from the UK, one who has been here for several years as a teacher in Nigerian schools, two who are kind of the British equivalent of the Peace Corps, Dagmar Langer, Dagmar is one of two young people who from Canada.

We also have a French teacher who is from what was formerly French Guinea. We are engaged in the beginning and operation of a key new institution in the Nigerian education system. The Donald's job to help establish a comprehensive secondary school and by 1970 to leave that school completely in the hands of Nigerian teachers and administrators. The first Nigerian to head this school and the man who will continue to work long after United States aid has stopped is BJ Ojo. We don't want people just to learn things or collect a number of facts. We want to 10 children who will be proper Nigerians, useful Nigerians in a modern world, to let them imbibe all the different changes taking place in other countries, in Europe and in America.

In America there is need. The hope of Gary Rose is paying gap, a town in Letcher County, Kentucky. It is Appalachia. I get it from one Camino Roscoe. What are we spending in paying gap? For education. David Ladd, principal of the school. David Lyon, teacher of paying gap, school at each grades five through eight. This is my first year at this school, but this is my fourth year at a teach.

The state supplies the book only in the county, supplies the rest of the books and the teaching aids that we have in the squid battle and company, supply the battle and they are having running a test on absentees and school. Directly to this school we get no federal aid except through library materials such as science books and that is all the federal aid to my knowledge that we get. Federal aid to Nigeria is to establish an educational system that will meet the urgent demands of a new and impatient country. This is a major U.S. objective. The aim to create a comprehensive school, democratic, multipurpose, practical. The kind of education we expect in our public schools. But the concept is new for Jacob.

In previous years Jacob would have had little chance of getting into the so-called grammar schools of the English tradition. These schools still prepare students only for university entrance. Admission to grammar schools is by stiff nationwide competitive examination. The story is different at IOTORO. In our school for example, we expect to have students who will proceed to university entrance. We also expect to have students who take a general education program for two years or so and then to technical education or agricultural education or home economics education or commercial studies. We will go up to approximately 670 students in the largest secondary school in the federal Republic of Nigeria. Our feeling is again that a facility like a large comprehensive secondary school can be a real center of useful activity in a community just as such schools have been in the United

States. IOTORO's school, Jacob's school, will serve the people in this area. We'll open the door to hundreds of boys and girls whose education might otherwise have had to stop at the seventh grade. We have at the present time 11 feeder primary schools and all of our student intake comes from those 11 feeder schools. We know a little something about these schools. We hope to learn a lot more about them. The children who come from the good feeder schools have a real advantage over the children who have not come from these good feeder schools. They come from inferior school situations. The shortage of teachers in Nigeria is of course very, very acute at all levels. It is most acute at the level of primary school teachers. Virtually none of whom has a college degree, many of whom do not even have the equivalent

of a high school diploma in the United States. To upgrade teaching in Nigeria, AID has a joint program with the Nigerian government to build teachers' colleges. These colleges are designed to teach the teachers of children. We want to be able to train children who will be able to be abreast of the times. We are preparing new curriculum materials and all fields of study, bringing in new materials that have been developed quite recently in the United States, both in the academic areas and in technical areas. We teach science to boys like Jacob, but in a different way, with a different approach. We study Kentucky history and they seem to enjoy that. I think the subject they enjoy most is probably arithmetic. Some schools in the county are teaching the new math as a separate interpreter right

now, because we haven't really worked on too much. I think I could use maps and concrete objects for arithmetic, as well as field strip. We need supplies for our science kids. We have two science kids. They were new. I think it was last year, some boys robbed the school and they took the science kids and they destroyed all the assets and things that we had. We're hoping to use some of the new science courses that have recently been developed in the United States with the Health and National Science Foundation and other institutions. Good new materials developed in the States and you're very extensive adaptation before they can be used successfully with Nigerian students.

Tell me, Jacob, do you feel like wildly being a gay student? Jacob, as you can see, is a very bright, able and enthusiastic youngster. He represents some of the real problems that we find here in teaching and working in a school in Nigeria. It's really quite a remarkable thing. Our children are coming to us as seventh graders, having used English as an instructional language really for only three years and very frequently in the primary schools. They are learning whatever in English they are learning from teachers whose English is not particularly good. We think it's really quite remarkable that our children are able to function at all in a second language. Because you feel like we're in the middle of this challenge, right, first grade teacher paying that school, when I have 30 children in our school, they don't get an individual attention.

But working as a group, they all talk the same thing. We have special times, few minutes, that we can spend each child. I think that does help quite a bit. Even like Jacob, get a certain amount of individual attention. He gets technical training as well as language and history. We want to train children who will be able to make use of their hands, who will have some respect for labor, to be able to develop some joy out of doing things themselves. Nigeria is primarily an agricultural country, although there are real strides being made toward industrialization, there is a large movement away from the farms and people have associated farming with poverty and quite rightly so. A very striking feature of this school is that for the very first time, agricultural training is formally and directly connected with a secondary education.

We want farmers to be educated, make them realize that farming is a civilized profession. We train them in such a way that they find farming lucrative. We have already started poetry which is doing very well. It is supplying all the eggs our students eat at the school. In addition, we have planted some fruit trees. We expect to raise some pigs, some sheep cattle for at least experimental purposes. It is very difficult to raise cattle here because we are in an area that is somewhat afflicted by Tetsi fly. There is a stream on the school site. We hope possibly to run a small fishery operation as an experimental venture. It is the agricultural training program, the technical educational program, that make us really distinctly different from a grammar school program. AID provides money in three ways to Iotoro, a construction grant of about a million dollars. This grant was matched by funds from the western regional government of Nigeria.

Since that initial grant, very little AID money has gone into construction. The western region is now carrying construction on its own. AID contributes also to equipment and salaries. A very large share of the AID money is going into the professional staff that is brought here under Harvard contract. AID funds are used for permanent equipment for the school, books for the library, furnishing science equipment for machinery and other equipment for our workshops. Education is not all study and work for Jekyll, there is also play. What does Gary do for play in Payne-Gown?

We don't have a basketball this year, we had it last year, but the teacher took basketball home with it. Yes, the sports program did leave and they had a basketball team last year, and this year I don't have enough boys to have a basketball team on days that it's fair weather outside and we play games in the bank out here. I was on my college team in swimming cricket and football, so I enjoyed all these and I hope it will be possible for us to bring up the children, so they will know at least how to enjoy their leisure.

We hope to give them a wide variation of games and then they will be able to select whichever one they like. One of the things that concerns us all the time is the fact that Nigeria is in fact a poor country and Nigeria is going to continue to be a poor country for a long time. Free primary education has been an effect for some time, but there is no free secondary education. Our fees are 60 pounds a year for boarding students and 36 pounds a year for day students and this represents a tremendous sacrifice for many Nigerian parents. We have constant reason to admire and really wonder at the sacrifices that are made by Nigerian parents. Our education will be our salvation here in the mountains.

That seems to be the only thing that will bring the standard of living up and people can send in their care packages and things, but really that's not what they need. They need something that they can work at to make a living. These people aren't lazy, they're really, at one time they were the proudest people in their country, but since they had to swallow most of their pride and accept charity, it's hard for them now, they have sort of come to depend on this. And this isn't what they need, they need some type of work that they can do. We have this federal assistance rundroom program in the federal government, supplies, the food, or most of the food in the county, supplies food also. The lunch is 10 cents per lunch, but most children here cannot afford the 10 cents and

so we all eat and the ones that can't afford it, you'll work for it. Quite a remarkable thing to see the contrast as between Jacob's home situation and the situation that he encounters here on this really very lovely campus. One of the sharp changes that Nigerian youngsters have to accustom themselves to is coming from the village where there is no electricity, where there is no water in the home. Seeing that this place is quite a startling experience, final hours that children are thrilled at the expanse of this place and the buildings and so forth, they find very exciting. And this really gives us something going for us here, we've got a tremendous initial enthusiasm which we hope to be able to capitalize on. Those people, it seems to me that they can attack our embassies and throwing models and

things and the government seems to pat them on the head and say that's okay, we'll still send you to school, we'll pay for your education and things. And maybe if we did this, we might be recognized or something and then we could get some petrolade that way. Max Milliken, an economist and director of the Center for International Studies at MIT. The contrast between what this country is doing for Jacob and what this country is doing or not doing for Gary exemplifies a very common argument about foreign aid. Why should we spend money in another country when there is want and need right here at home? But there are two things wrong with this argument.

First it's based on pictures and not numbers and we need some numbers to understand the problem. Now President Johnson recently signed a bill which provides $1.3 billion of federal help for education of the underprivileged in this country. We spend less than 1% of this amount this year for education in Nigeria. Now there's also the question of why we spend this money in Nigeria, is it crucial? Nigeria presents the underdeveloped part of the world where two-thirds of humanity lives. Having education there reduces the likelihood of violence and instability in the turbulent transition to the 20th century these countries are going through. It lessons the likelihood of the kind of turbulence we are now witnessing in Vietnam. In other words, we are spending there to try to create a world in which Gary can grow up without the terrible economic and human costs of international conflict. What we spend for seven or eight days of war in Vietnam will pay for a whole year of

educational assistance to Nigeria. The argument of those who favor such foreign aid is that if we forestall another Vietnam in Africa with these expenditures it is certainly well worth the cost. Now our program of aid to Nigeria illustrates a number of key features of our foreign aid program. First place it's heavily concentrated in a very small number of countries where the prospects of effectiveness are great. Nigeria is one of only seven countries in which we are spending this year 50% of our economic aid funds. It's the only one of the seven in tropical Africa. We look to another such country India last week and we'll examine our efforts in a third Colombia a week from today. The Nigeria aid program also illustrates the principles of self-help which we have attached as a criterion for all of our economic aid. Aid to education in Nigeria is part of the United States commitment in that country.

Nigeria is making from our own resources the major contribution. We're contributing only those essential skills and resources which the Nigerians don't have themselves and without which they simply couldn't move forward. With the Iotaro school for example we provide educational talents which the Nigerians don't have. Now Nigeria illustrates still another aspect of US foreign aid. We concentrate in each country on those bottlenecks which need to be broken which limit the country's capacity to meet the legitimate needs of its own people. These priorities differ from country to country. In Vietnam economic aid is given to people in rural communities of a strife-torn country. In India where education is pretty well advanced and human talents are already quite far developed we help with capital equipment primarily with the power, the tools and the machinery they need to exploit their own natural resources.

Now in Nigeria the most critical problem at this stage is the underdeveloped skills and capacities of the Nigerian people. So major attention is being devoted to education. Education however takes only about a third of our total aid to Nigeria. Another third goes to agriculture which produces half the total income of the country and out of which four fifths of all Nigerians make their living. The balance goes for transport, communications and the beginnings of industry. All of which must be developed if Nigeria is to be modernized. With our aid to Nigeria we are trying to help instill self-confidence. So that Jacob and the other Jacobs recognize that through their own efforts they can achieve the kinds of lives, the kinds of job opportunities, the kinds of advancement for their children that they aspire to. Moreover that they can create a new society that increasing numbers of them are determined

to have without resorting to revolution, to authoritarian controls or extremist ideologies. Experience tells us that by the time communism or dictatorship actually threatens the Jacobs of this underdeveloped world our influence is already sharply limited and we are faced with an expensive salvage job like Vietnam. What does all this mean to Gary in his search for education at pain gap? It means that Gary has a better chance of living at peace in this world if the modest help we give Jacob is successful. So the problem is not educating Jacob or Gary but educating Gary and helping the Nigerians educate Jacob so the two can support each other in an interdependent world. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.