Everytime my Head of Department comes to class, there are usually issues to address. And these issues, most of the time, revolve around the lack of civic sense among students. The Head of Department could ramble on for a long time and the weight from the students’ hum like uproar, in protest, will send the former out. They view the HOD as too disciplined and meddlesome. The humming, not being liberal, also, is a lack of civic sense.
When we lack civic sense, we become disorganised and activities that could take minutes extend unnecessarily to hours. We lament this happens because authorities have not put in place strategies to control the crowd, but that is just a one-way paradigm to the contingencies of time wastage in our conduct as students.
The school has norms, rules and regulations, as well as codes of conducts to guide our behaviour as students. These unspoken yet acceptable behavioural patterns will promote harmonious organisation of ourselves provided followed. However, when we deviate from this esteemed pattern, we become disorganised and at the end, we direly bear the consequences.
Students may see themselves as civilised people. Some may also consider themselves more cultured than the other. Meanwhile with this self-esteem, most students lack what is called civic sense. The lack of civic sense apparently negates other social values one may exhibits.
By definition, civic sense refers to safekeeping the environment and its inhabitants as a show of social duty. It stresses the need for an active member of a group to see to social changes, respect the opinions of others, to be adaptive and considerate to authorities and so on. The lack of it makes society appear discordant.
You may wonder what is wrong with the psyche of students who take pride in littering the floor when they could have just dump the stuff in a waste bin that is not too far from them. Lecture rooms before the close of the day become irritating as they get littered with all sorts of waste: cans of drinks, pure water nylons, papers, leftovers. To put it point blank, it is a show of irresponsibility.
Cleanliness, we concur, leads to godliness. Since we claim of personal hygiene in our respective houses as students, why are the same hygienical traits not portrayed in the lecture rooms? Maybe most do not wash the dish, sweep their rooms before leaving their hostels – maybe.
Lecture rooms is not only place this unhygienic practice is predominant. In school buses too, it does not go unnoticed.
It is after we eat that we dump waste; however, there is also a common insensitive unhygienic practice among students. If not that I was fortunate that day, the slime spit spewed by a student might have landed right on my face. Haba! School bus is not Kórópe na. And this is a school vicinity, not Lagos roads. A learned student for that matter! It is inappropriate and shameful!
Decorum is also a show of civic sense. Administrative officers while registering grown-up students who should be able to organise themselves experience fatigue when doing this. To maintain a queue is a struggle. And this is usually caused by some students who think themselves smarter than the others.
Last semester when exam pass was to be given, a friend who arrived 7am was not privileged on the day to complete her registration because of disordeliness in queues despite that names were written, numbers given, and she, as mild and modest as she was, portrayed decorum when others turned the coordinated queue to survival of the fittest. A bodybuilder male friend of mine was also a victim. I went to the registration center for three days consecutively before I was able to complete my registration.
And while the scenarios of jumbling and jostling were on, an authority came to instill orderliness, but to your shock, the uproar in protest sent the latter away.
When we cannot coordinate queues for registration, can we then control entry of transit when everybody wants to get home quickly? We have chosen hardship as the comfortable way to get things done.
To say madness is the medicine for madness will display our school as a psychiatric hospital. Although it is the students in this uncivilised act that need to be taken care of, not the authories to enforce rules and regulations either by sanction or neglect.
Come to think of it, when the first person to arrive is attended to first and the last man be the last to be attended to, is that not fairness and civic consciousness in public space?Moreover, the person that is in the middle of the queue will not be cheated. The weak will have equal chances. This becomes ideal when you recall that this is supposed to be a civil society and not a riot zone where everybody has to stretch muscles and struggle to scale through.
It is also the lack of courtesy to shut authorities up with rumpus when addressing the students even when we are dissatisfied by the decision being taken. If we have no regard for school authorities, how are we going to respect our colleagues?
A society that would be harmonious would have civic students as its inhabitants. Otherwise, the story would be cynical.
Civic sense: civic students, civic leaders, and civic society should be the motto etched on our country’s image.
Willy-nilly, if we continue to show negligence to our civic duties as students, what is the essence of our claimed civilisation?
Quadri Yahya is an ND2 student of the department of Mass Communication
