I have engaged many Nigerians in discussions, and I have noticed that most frequently misuse the term "society" whenever it suits their narrative.
Did you know, for example, that when you blame society, you are also blaming yourself?
A society is simply the aggregation of collective people within a system. It is not a single person, nor is it merely an institution as you presented it. It is the name given to our collective human ecosystem within a specific zone. It comprises many units:
The People: Who serve as the primary components.
The Family: Which acts as the nucleus of the society.
The Institutions: Like markets, schools, the government, the military, clubs, professional bodies, and traditional institutions.
All of these collectively make up what we call society. What you and many others miss is that a society is responsible for both the good and the bad within it. We are collectively responsible. The very same society that produced Dangote, Achebe, and Tinubu also produced the Nigerians begging on the streets. If we are going to blame society for the misfortunes of the unfortunate, we must also credit that same society for the good. To do otherwise is the height of hypocrisy—blaming only what is wrong on society and refusing to see what is right, just so we don't have to face the mirror that exposes our flawed logic.
The True Mandate of the School System
This brings me straight to the heart of my earlier comment, which you flipped upside down. In that comment, I stated that it is impossible for any institution—specifically referring to universities and schools—to train anyone to be self-independent.
Schools are not built to equip you with character, values, or social intelligence. That is the duty of parents. Schools exist to equip you with the skills and knowledge needed to navigate life and chart your own direction; they will never tell you what to do with that knowledge. That choice is yours alone, decided by the values your parents instilled in you and what you picked up from the streets. When parents openly blame society for the job they should do, they plant seeds of suffering for the future generation, and society eventually pays the price.
Self-independence is not a matter of knowledge or academic credentials; it is an attitude and a product of your value system. It is a part of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), which is responsible for 90% of the success any man can achieve, while the remaining percentage goes to the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) measured in the classroom. It is something you must deliberately cultivate through personal discipline, not something you acquire just because you crammed books.
This is why, in every class of about 50 students taught by the same teachers using the exact same curriculum, some will succeed and some will fail. One man can graduate with a first-class degree and end up debt-ridden, while a classmate with lower grades from the exact same cohort is content, happy, and successful. Yet, some of us look at the sky and blame the school for those who failed, while completely neglecting those who succeeded.
Specialization and the Reality of Changing Environments
I mentioned the case of auto engineers and their diverse opportunities, and I am shocked that a practicing engineer would flaw that logic. Do you not know that an automotive engineer can become a spare parts trader, a maintenance specialist, or a mechanic? In your eagerness to argue, you flawed the very realities that your own profession exemplifies. Every engineer does not need to go in the same direction. They specialize, make decisions that suit their capabilities, and utilize their knowledge in a way that benefits them. School does not teach you this!
When you mention that "institutions train," you are being 100% evasive. You wrote: "An institution that is not properly managed and upgraded to meet the fast-growing population seriously weakens the expectation of the foundation..." Quite frankly, that sounded meaningless to me. The exact same institutions you berate also produced the men who upgraded themselves and the system.
Whatever you are trained in at the university today may not be what you practice tomorrow. When I was in school, Electric Vehicles (EVs) did not exist. Today, they do. The professionals and professors who teach this new field did not learn it during their Bachelor’s degrees; they evolved and developed themselves over time as the environment changed. Imagine if those professors blamed their old school days for their inability to rise to the occasion.
The education system was never intended to pack static information into the heads of learners. By the time you leave school, you will find that the system has already moved ahead. Therefore, school is designed to teach you how to think, how to respond to change, how to take initiative, and how to learn on your own. It was created to make you know how to find out what you do not know. If anyone passes through tertiary education and still doesn't grasp this, they have entirely wasted their education.
Rejecting the Culture of Hand-Holding
To expect an education system to teach you everything is like expecting God to bathe and feed you just because He is all-powerful. The kind of hand-holding and spoon-feeding you are suggesting is exactly what destroys the next generation, confining them to being permanently, mentally dependent people. Even God, in both the Bible and the Quran, states that He will not do for you what you must do for yourself—much less a human institution.
Do not make excuses for mentally lazy people. No government and no university in the world will make you self-independent when your mentality is to wait for a handout from politicians. (As a side note: your point about the example you cited was already explained by Tosin himself in his full rejoinder. His points measure exactly what was in the post you are arguing against, so please stop depending on headlines).
True Education Goes Beyond the Certificate
What you are calling education is limited to the classroom. True education extends far deeper into fundamental basics. Your home training is education. Your values, your daily life, your travels, your interactions, and your engagement with people are all parts of a broad-based education—one that transcends what a teacher tells you and goes deep into what you tell yourself.
Many of our parents did not go to school, but they were deeply educated. They made money, built lives, and did not depend on politicians, despite having no certificates. Ironically, the best time to live a good life in Nigeria was when a certificate was not the deciding factor.
The moment everything became tied to a piece of paper, young people started learning by rote memorization, stepping out into life hoping to get a job based solely on their grades. Life has a way of humbling that mindset. The classroom education you are talking about is limited; the education I am trying to focus your mind on is far, far more valuable than the one acquired between four walls.
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