She did everything right. She attended school without fail, studied when others were sleeping, passed every exam that was put in front of her, and collected her certificate on graduation day with the kind of relief that comes from years of hardwork and efforts. Her family was proud. Her teachers were proud. She was proud.
Then she stepped outside the school gate and the world looked nothing like what she had been prepared for.
The jobs she applied for wanted experience she had never been given the chance to get. The interviews asked questions that no textbook had ever addressed. The skills that employers kept mentioning: critical thinking, problem solving, communication, adaptability, the ability to work with people who were nothing like her, were things she had never once been formally taught. She could recite theories and pass tests and write essays. But she had never been shown how to fail at something and try again. Never been taught how to manage her own time without a bell telling her when to move. Never been given a real problem to solve that did not already have an answer at the back of the book.
She was educated. And she was unprepared. And the painful truth is that she is not the exception.
Nigeria’s formal education system was built for a different era. It was designed at a time when the primary goal of schooling was to produce a workforce that could follow instructions, retain information, and fit into clearly defined roles in clearly defined institutions. Memorisation was valued. Compliance was rewarded. The certificate at the end was the destination, and everything before it was simply the path to get there. For the world that existed when that system was designed, it made a kind of sense.
But that world is gone. The economy young Nigerians are stepping into today does not primarily reward the ability to memorise and reproduce information, it rewards the ability to think, to create, to adapt, to solve problems that have never been solved before, and to keep learning long after the last exam has been written. The most in-demand skills in the global economy right now are human skills: creativity, emotional intelligence, collaboration, critical thinking, communication. And these are precisely the skills that are treated as extras rather than essentials in school curriculums.
This is not an argument against formal education. Schools matter. Teachers matter. The structure and discipline that a good school provides matter enormously. But a school system that measures its own success purely by examination results and certificate completion rates, while producing graduates who cannot navigate the world waiting for them, is a system that needs to be honest about its limitations and willing to change.
What does education look like beyond the classroom? It looks like a young person who is given real problems to work on, not hypothetical ones with predetermined answers, but messy, open-ended challenges that require them to think, collaborate, and sit with uncertainty. It looks like mentorship that connects young people to adults who are doing things they want to do, in environments where they can watch and learn and ask questions and make mistakes safely. It looks like vocational and technical training that is treated with the same respect and investment as academic education, because a young person who can build something, fix something, or create something of value is just as educated as one who can write an essay about it. It looks like spaces where emotional intelligence is developed alongside intellectual intelligence, where young people learn how to manage themselves, relate to others, and navigate conflict without it becoming a crisis.
It also looks like families who understand that their role in a child’s education does not end at the school gate. The conversations that happen at home, the exposure to different environments, the permission to be curious and ask questions and explore interests that may not fit neatly into a school subject, all of these are education. All of these shape a young person’s capacity to engage with the world. A parent who reads, who discusses current events, who exposes their child to different people and places and ideas, is doing educational work that no school can fully replicate.
Communities, too, have a role. The informal learning that happens in a well-functioning community, the knowledge passed between neighbours, the skills shared across generations, the exposure that comes from simply being embedded in a place where different kinds of people are doing different kinds of things, is education in its most original form. And it has been undervalued for far too long.
For organisations working in education and youth development, the challenge is to think beyond programmes that simply supplement the existing system and start imagining what it would look like to genuinely expand what we consider learning to be. At Oselobua Family Foundation, this is a question we keep returning to, because we have seen what young people are capable of when they are given the right kind of education. Not just the kind that fills them with information, but the kind that teaches them what to do with it. The kind that builds not just knowledge but confidence, not just skills but character, not just graduates but people who are genuinely ready for what comes next.
The question every parent, teacher, policymaker, and organisation invested in education needs to sit with is this: Are we preparing young people for the life that is actually ahead of them? Or are we preparing them for a version of the world that no longer exists in the way we are describing it?