05/10/2026
WORLD TEACHERS’ DAY: EVERYONE IS A TEACHER
Tomorrow, 5 October, the world celebrates World Teachers’ Day — a day dedicated to recognising the people who stand in classrooms, laboratories, lecture halls and learning spaces, shaping minds and preparing generations for the future. But perhaps we should look at teaching from a much broader perspective.
Teaching is not limited to the classroom. If learning were limited to the classroom, then humanity would be in serious trouble. We learn from our parents, our grandparents, our colleagues, our mistakes and our experiences. We learn from professionals, artisans, entrepreneurs, religious leaders, civil servants and even strangers. We learn from conversations, books, technology, culture, failure and life itself. And if we are all capable of learning, then we are all capable of teaching.
The question, therefore, is not only, “What are our teachers doing?” The bigger question is: What are we doing with what we know?
There is a generation coming behind us that deserves to be better informed, better equipped, more critical in its thinking and more capable than the generation before it. That is how civilisation is supposed to work. The next generation should not merely inherit our possessions; they should inherit our knowledge. They should inherit our wisdom and our experiences. They should learn from our mistakes so that they do not have to repeat them. And they should take what we have taught them and go further than we ever did.
Unfortunately, the global education crisis tells us that we have a lot of work to do. The World Bank and UNESCO describe “learning poverty” as the inability to read and understand a simple, age-appropriate text by around age 10. Current estimates put learning poverty at about 89% in sub-Saharan Africa — nearly nine out of every ten children. In Nigeria, UNICEF reported in 2024 that 10.2 million primary-school-age children and 8.1 million junior-secondary-age children were out of school, while 74% of children aged 7–14 lacked basic reading and mathematics skills.
These are not merely education statistics. They are warnings about the future.
Otokiti Olaoluwa
Data Innovarions Nigeria