Value-Based Education for Nigeria’s Development: Ethical and Metaphysical Foundations
Chrysanthus Nnaemeka Ogbozo
Abstract
The human society has always tended towards development whether by nature or by nurture. The tendency is very
true, given the fact that the individuals composing the society display a natural propensity to improve themselves
on different levels. This propensity became a collective and global responsibility when, at the dawn of the present
Millennium, the United Nations articulated what she called “Millennium Development Goals” where education
is one of them.
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From that moment of UN’s declaration of the goals, the pursuit of education assumed a sense of
urgency. Upon reflection, the urgent need for educational development became more obvious in the face of the
phenomenon of governance that is displayed in many countries, especially in Africa. It is a phenomenon that
shows leaders who are said to be educated, but regrettably have under-developed their various countries, thereby
calling for a re-think on the quality of their education. The re-thinking is what this article sets out to ignite,
particularly as it concerns Nigeria. To do this, we adopted the phenomenological, historical and critical methods
of inquiry. With the phenomenological method, the different scenes of leadership and education in Africa, and in
particular Nigeria, are made to appear (phainesthai) in their complexities. The historical method is used to show
the evolution of educational thinking and practice in Nigeria whereas the critical method is adopted to evaluate
the issues involved. Finally, the paper proposes a value-based education with its ethical and metaphysical
features as the way to sustainable development in Nigeria and indeed Africa at large. The key words are:
education, educational system, values and value-based education.