Pages: (1-17 )
Abstract
The educational sector of every nation plays premium on the teaching and learning of history. The teaching and learning of history exposes students to the socio-cultural, economic and political trajectories of the immediate environment. However, in the Nigerian context, the unforgettable academic mistake made between 2007 and 2019, was the removal of history as a subject from the primary and junior secondary school curriculum. The exclusion of history from the school curriculum did not only create dearth in the knowledge of history, it also resulted into increasing apathy in the study of history. While existing historical engagements have articulated the method of teaching and learning of history, scholarly investigations have not interrogated the factors responsible for poor attitude of teachers and students to the teaching and learning of history. To address this void in history scholarship, this paper aims at investigating the attitude to scholarship in history. It examines the attitude of both the teachers’ and learners’ to the study of history in secondary schools. Furthermore, the study examines government input and policies towards the attitude to scholarship in history in secondary schools during this period. The paper however concludes that certain factors on the part of teachers such as gender, age, experience and qualifications as well as variables on the part of the learners like gender, motivation and perception affects the attitude to scholarship in history in secondary schools. Two local government secondary schools in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria were chosen and six secondary schools were selected from the two local government areas. Using primary and secondary data sources, the study maintains that attitude to scholarship in history has dropped significantly from both the teachers and learners during the period under study. It is hoped that an investigation of scholarship in history will extend the frontiers of research on how to improve on the study of history as a discipline in Nigeria.
Keywords: Attitude , Scholarship, History, Nigeria,