Prof Okpeh Okpeh, president, middle, Sam Aghalino, VP, left, and Dave Imbua, assistant secretary, of the association in Asaba, yesterday
The Historical Society of Nigeria (HSN) has urged the National Assembly to make an enabling law to back the presidential directive on the compulsory teaching of history in schools.
Speaking at a press briefing on the eve of its confab in Asaba, the Delta State capital, yesterday, the president on the body, Prof. Okpeh Okpeh, said the enabling law would ensure schools carry out the policy and treat the teaching of the subject with the requisite attention it deserves, because according to him, “our people need to know how Nigeria came about. You want to look at the issues affecting this nation without putting into the picture the body that has in its custody the history of Nigeria.”
Adding that, “We are trying to get the National Assembly to make a law returning history to the schools,” he stated that, “everybody needs a deep sense of history in order to understand how we came to be, and where we are”
Speaking on the same subject, Dr. Dave Imbua, assistant secretary, told journalists that it was greatly to the disadvantage of the country that history was removed from the schools’ curriculum.
He lamented that for three decades when history was removed from the curriculum of schools, a generation of Nigerians passed through the educational system without the knowledge of their own history.
The HSN, expected to be attended by 400 history scholars, would be holding it annual confab, the 64th, in Asaba from October 6 to Wednesday, October 9, with the theme “Building the Nigerian Nation Since 1914: Motion, Movement and Actors.”
