By Edwin Eriye
The Principal of LASU international school, Odumbo Taiwo, at the annual prize giving day ceremony of Ikorodu grammar school emphasized the relevance of educating the hearts and hands of students.
The principal, while delivering the keynote speech, called on educators to give their beneficiaries ‘balanced education’.
“The founding fathers of education intended it to fully take care of its beneficiaries. For this reason, education must be balanced. To be balanced, it means that the designed education must take care of the training of the head, the hands and the heart. These are the three “Hs” in education. On the parlance of education, we refer to them as the cognitive domain, the psychomotor domain and the affective domain respectively as postulated by Benjamen Bloom and friends in 1956 which is popularly known as Blooms taxonomy of Educational objectives. The affective domains is what I refer to as the third “H” in this speech.
“The heart happens to be the part of man that judges between the good and the bad and discriminates between decency and indecency. The heart is the seat of conscience, discipline, sensitivity, respect and morality, to mention just a few. This aspect of a person is what makes him or her human. This is the part in which as students we must take very good care of, if we want to have our society filled with human beings. Regrettably and unfortunately, this education of the heart is the most neglected aspect of education in the contemporary times.
“That is why most of the social challenges of the society in this age are those caused by lack of conscience, respect, sensitivity, morality, discipline and above all humanity. They all point to the fact that the heart is sick. When this part is left uncatered for, we turn out engineers, lawyers, medical doctors, scientists, politicians, and even teachers who are ill-mannered, uncultured, undisciplined and insensitive to humanity.
“While I am completely against inflicting physical or other kinds of injuries on students in the name of discipline, I advocate a reasonable discipline that is adequate to make the children grow into adults with hearts in them; adults that can feel, adults that will recognize and respect the value and sacredness of life, adults that will be sensitive to the plights of others, adults that will be morally healthy.
“The three major religions that may be here together this this morning are the Traditional African Religion, the Islam and Christianity. I do not know of any of these religions which is against reasonable discipline. Therefore, I enjoin all major stakeholders (the Government, School management, Teachers, Parents and Students) to do their best in this area and also cooperate with the school in its efforts to discourage forms of behavior, conduct and traits that will not be of benefit to the children and the society.
“To the school authority. In keeping with the ethos of the 21st Century child upbringing, let the school management and administration design appropriate means of educating the heart especially with the reintroduction of moral instruction in schools. This coupled with other two components of education will make the children great and responsible citizens of the world” , Odumbo Taiwo A said.
Blackbox Nigeria also gathered that Odumbo Taiwo finished from the Ikorodu Grammar School 27 years ago.
