In a country like France, which consistently produces Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners and Fields medalists, there are approximately 900,000 teachers for around 16 million students—a ratio of 1 to 17.7—with an average teacher age of 38 years, according to off icial sources (1).
In the Western education model, it takes two decades to produce an “average teacher,” and a student-to-teacher ratio of 1 to 15 is considered necessary (2).
MATHEMATICAL CERTAINTY
Now consider Nigeria, with its 220 million inhabitants, including 110 million individuals under 19 requiring education. By Western standards, Nigeria would need 15 million teachers. But how can those teachers be trained? First, the country should train an initial generation of one million teachers dedicated to educating the next generation. Given that it takes about 20 years to train a generation, it would require 40 years to staff Nigeria’s education system completely. Add to this the cost of building enough schools and universities, and remember that Nigeria’s population doubles every 50 years — it is projected to reach 450 million by 2070. This means the previous figure could easily double, requiring the training of a third generation of teachers, which would take another 20 years (totaling 60 years) before the education system is fully prepared. Achieving this goal would also require hundreds of billions of dollars in investment.
Had Nigeria 10 or 20 million teachers already, it could consider achieving this goal under such a model. Unfortunately, today, there are only 2.3 million teachers in the country, according to the Teachers Registration Council.
Expanding this logic to the so-called ‘Global South,’ one might ask: how can its growing population be educated rapidly (within a decade rather than a century), especially in a world where education is the most critical factor for economic growth and health?
I don’t believe there’s a perfect solution to this problem. But it is mathematically certain that the formula of “one 30-year-old teacher for every 15 students” is not viable.
THE PURSUIT OF NOVEL MODELS
African countries need to leapfrog to modern education systems, much like they did with telecommunications: in the 1990s and 2000s, the continent skipped landline infrastructure and moved directly to mobile solutions.
Western education models are not feasible for the ‘Global South.’ Although many countries aspire to create institutions like Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford or Sciences Po, with some making impressive strides, the truth is that without huge financial and organisational resources to raise or attract top teachers, delivering this level of education to large audiences is impractical. In reality, such high-quality education is generally accessible only to wealthy and already well-educated countries.
The good news is that there are alternative teaching methods. Online education can considerably reduce the cost of building classrooms and make education more accessible to millions of students globally.
However, teaching online also presents challenges. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have not achieved significant success so far, as most learners do not return after their initial year, noted a study (3). Online education must go beyond simply recording and broadcasting videos of teachers to students, in the illusion of addressing their needs.
Standard passive teaching methods have consistently failed—and will always fail. Studies show that lecture-based retention rates are only 5%, while hands-on practice results in a 75% retention rate, and teaching others leads to a 90% retention rate (4).
Decades ago, management schools introduced case study methods, which have demonstrated a higher efficiency.
By getting rid of lectures , you can forget about the teacherto-student ratio issue while simultaneously improving the efficiency of knowledge transmission
Now is the time for even bolder approaches. By getting rid of lectures and having students teach each other through practice, you can forget about the teacher-to-student ratio issue while simultaneously improving the efficiency of knowledge transmission.
For the past two decades, I have experimented with “no-teacher” approaches in the coding industry, developing a hands-on, many-to-many educational model. We boast a number of success stories in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, primarily using online models. In Nigeria, our Outsource Global Academy provides high-standard full-stack development training to thousands of students.
In Kazakhstan, during the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, our physical school, which initially had 40 students, rapidly shifted to an online model, accommodating 400 registered students. No traditional school could suddenly scale to educate 10 times as many students without compromising quality (assuming they would manage to upgrade their infrastructure).
Addressing educational challenges in the ‘Global South’ presents a chance to redefine the possibilities of learning and teaching. As traditional models fall short, advancing requires strategies that push beyond conventional limits. With the advent of new technologies and new educational models, delivering quality education to a broad audience is increasingly achievable and no longer a distant dream.
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(1) INSEE, ministry of education.
(2) The OECD considers the student-to-teacher ratio a benchmark for education quality, with an average of 1 to 15.
(3) Justin Reich & José A Ruipérez-Valiente, “The MOOC pivot,” Science, Jan. 2019.
(4) Refer to the ‘learning pyramid.’ While this model has faced criticism—acknowledging that student behaviour is more complex than the pyramid suggests—it still provides a valuable framework to guide educational strategies.
By Kwame Yamgnane
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