John Dewey’s Instrumentalism and Nigeria’s Educational Experience

Abstract

Nigeria’s educational experience fails to be proactive or responsive to the numerous challenges bedevilling its society. In its curriculum and pedagogy, it fails to take adequate consideration of the peculiarities of the socio-cultural reality of Nigerians. Despite the admission of the instrumental value of education in the National Policy on Education (2004) as a tool for national development, we continue to see a sheer form of non-pragmatic formalism, verbalism, legalism, and blatant mimicry of British, American, and lately Asian systems, structures, and models in our system. Some, if not all, of these educational systems, structures, and models we mimic are alien and alienating to the students, teachers, and society. Of course, there is nothing wrong with adopting functional models from other societies as the world is fast becoming a global village; the challenge lies in the failure to fine-tune and glocalize these adopted models to suit our needs and preserve our values and culture. Thus, in addressing these problems, this paper particularly advocated for the application of Dewey’s instrumentalism to the Nigerian educational experience. We, however, understand that the social, political, economic, or philosophical circumstances that might have necessitated Dewey’s concept of instrumentalism might differ in details from the Nigerian educational experience today. Nevertheless, we argued that regardless of such differences that might exist in both societies (America and Nigeria), in principle Dewey’s instrumentalism is feasible for Nigeria’s educational experience.