AS academic activities at different levels of the education sector get disrupted by the nationwide strike precipitated by the imposition of a new fuel price regime by the Federal Government which has also brought untold hardship and deprivations to students on campuses, parents and guardians have come under heavy criticism by the academic community for not speaking up against government's policies that are inimical to educational development in the country.

The Parents Teachers Association (PTA) under its current National Chairman, Alhaji Babs Animashaun, one of the critics, Professor W.O. Alli of the Department of Political Science, University of Jos, is like a government agency, where officials want to make a political career.

"The PTA officials think their main job is to support any government in its misguided policy on education, thus making it easy for government to manipulate the parents. The PTA is busy attending meaningless government sponsored jamborees that do not advance the course of education," Alli says.

Among the stakeholders, the parents stand out as a special category being the major sponsors of students to schools and expectedly, as the major beneficiaries if their children make a success of their exposure to formal education. This fact is at the back of the mind of Alli while arguing that parents should be more involved in matters concerning education policy.

To analysts however, the contrary is the case. Professor K. I.. Ekpenyong of the Chemistry Department, University of Jos, contends that problems associated with the under-funding of public primary and secondary schools as well as universities persist because parents have not seen the need to ask questions and demand answers from those charged with the administration of public funds for education. "Government tells you and me that it has no money and, because we are already used to the self-help syndrome, we accept government position without questions. Yet many of the operators of government machinery are getting richer by the day to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their supposed monthly income alone. So, where is this extraordinary wealth coming from? We dare not ask. It is none of our business may be!" Ekpenyong says.

Speaking further on the apathy of parents to ascertaining the environment under which their children learn, Ekpenyong added that for many parents, the first visit to the university is about admission while the second and the fnal visit is for the purpose of "walking our son or daughter home with a earned certificate, diploma or degree."

Appealing to parents to find time to visit the university, Ekpenyong explains that such visit will give parents first hand information on the problems facing their children in schools. "When you visit, some of the scenes you are most likely to encounter would include: over-filled lecture halls with half of students standing both inside and outside the lecture hall; students at a lecture seated on laboratory bench tops, with their laps substituted for the conventional writing desks; crowded laboratories with some 50-100 students surrounding one equipment, which in an ideal situation is meant for between two and five students," he reveals.

But the non-challant attitude of parents to educational policies in public schools controls sharply with their disposition to the administration of private schools where many of them have taken refuge following the protracted crises that have bedevilled the public school system. According to Alli, parents outdo one another at the individual private school level, trying to become members of the executive committees of the PTA, donating generously and contributing huge amounts to the different projects of these private schools. While in the public school system, effective money-donating PTA is virtually non-existent, parents of students in some private universities are coming together to raise money and provide facilities for these institutions, he explains.

But, how and when did decay in public schools set in, a development which has forced many parents in sending their children to private s primary and secondary schools at huge costs to them while only the children of the poor or those in rural areas now patronise the public schools? Many would ask. According to Professor E. E. O. Alemika, department of Sociology, Unijos, the regime of General Yakubu Gowon took the first step of actions that marked the beginning of the decay of education in the country. The first action, according to Alemika, was the authoritarian repression of a strike action by university medical lecturers in the early 1970s.

Gowon administration ordered that the striking lecturers, who hitherto lived in officials quarters and were therefore able to maintain wide-ranging academic and social interactions, be forcefully ejected from their official quarters. Ever since then, he explains, lecturers have always felt insecure in official quarters, and consequently, the preference, thereafter, has been to live off-campus. The trend towards off-campus residence has, according to Alemika, affected the level of interaction among lecturers and between them and students.

The second action by the Gowon regime that negatively impacted on the educational system was, to Alemika, the takeover of primary and secondary schools established by voluntary agencies, communities and individuals. The Obasanjo military regime followed this policy by federal takeover of regional tertiary institutions like Obafemi Awolowo University; Ahmadu Bello University; Kaduna Polytechnic, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, arguing that one of the major consequences of this action was the expansion of government educational responsibility without corresponding human and financial resources while the participation of communities and individuals in education was subverted.

The decision of the Murtala/Obasanjo regime to increase intake of university students without articulating long-term measures for contending with problems arising from this has also been identified as one policy that heralded the destruction and decay of Nigerian university education. According to Alemika, this led to expansion in student population without corresponding facilities, especially in the areas of hostel accommodation and catering services. He contends that the repressive and destructive responses of the Obasanjo military regime to the various demands by students at that time more than anything else have been responsible for the rapid decay and collapse of the university system.

Some of the responses, according to him, include the following: 300 per cent increase in the charges for hostel accommodation and feeding; introduction of a policy that universities must not build new hostels; sending troops to campuses to maintain law and order, which frequently results in the killing and maiming of students as well as raping of students; arbitrary sacking of Vice-Chancellors like Professors Iya Abubakar of ABU, and J. F. Ade-Ajayi of the Unilag in 1978; under-funding of universities as a deliberate policy and the sacking of brilliant and progressive lecturers and administrators in the universities, including Comrade Ola Oni, Dr. Bade Onimode, Omafume Onoge, Akin Oji, Edwin Madunagu and Bene Madunagu, Tunde Adeniran in 1978, who were all blamed for inflaming the students' nation-wide reaction to the bad educational policies of the Obasanjo regime - commonly referred to as "Ali must go." He explains that successive military governments since the 1980s have continued in the tradition bequeathed to them by the Obasanjo regime in the 1970s, and yet the majority of parents are watching the destruction of public education system by the government.

But, despite the perceived indifference of parents to public policies on education which are seen by analysts as retrogressive, many still believe that the parents can still team up to effect a turnaround in the nation's education. According to Alli, parents must begin to show greater interest in government's policy on education. They must also invest in education by building hostels or lecture theatres or provide equipment or donate books or pay for subscriptions to journals or provide boreholes, or help build or repair roads on campuses or even just plant trees or flowers or donate lawn mowers to schools.

He also opines that the Nigerian parents should be more meaningfully involved in the efforts to resolve the crises confronting the public schools and universities. Importantly, parents must take bold social and political actions to ensure that their children are not just in the classrooms but that they get the best education that can compete with any in the world, he added.