Education and the Intentionality of a Performing Arts Educator in Nigeria

Bode Ojoniyi^1,

¹Drama Unit, Department of Languages and Linguistics, Osun State University, Nigeria

Cite this paper:
Bode Ojoniyi. Education and the Intentionality of a Performing Arts Educator in Nigeria. American Journal of Educational Research. 2015; 3(5):631-636. doi: 10.12691/education-3-5-16

Abstract

Education, particularly its form: aims, objectives and goals could be dangerous depending on the intentionality of the giver of such education. From such theory of education as “classical conditioning” and some others, we know that the form of a permitted or given education may be to programme or condition the minds of a people to always conform to a social, cultural or psychological stereotype. So, education could be a tool to force social, cultural or political conformation on a people in a subtle way. Such education makes a robot out of the people who are not really able to think through issues themselves. As a teacher, I see and deal with passive students who act like robots without original thought and native intelligence. This may be a carryover of the perversion of colonialism on their psyches and the understanding of most of the teachers and educators who took over from the colonial masters – for no doubt, their understanding, interpretation and appropriation of the interpretations of their circumstances affect and influence the form of education they have passed down to this generation. This also accounts for one of the reasons no Africa State, in spite of the available data on the primacy of mother tongue education, has reverted or officially adopted mother tongue education till today. As a Performing Artist and a teacher, my interest is therefore in using the theatre to provoke my students to social, cultural and political deconstruction of the cultural, religious and traditional ways of life that have been subtly imposed on them through educational conditioning. I have tried to do this through what I called “Theatre of Intentionality”. In this paper, therefore, based on my experience with the students in two theatre workshops, I like to explore what I perceive as the place of the theory of “dialectical texts consciousness” in analysing human intentionality in other to promote generative form of education that is capable of provoking societal transformations.

Keywords:
Education Intentionality Performing Arts Educator

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