Education for Sustainable National Security

Security is the Fundamental objective of every institution and nation’s leadership. For Nigeria as a nation, the problem of insecurity has remained the most intractable challenge in our history. This paper examines how education can be used as a weapon to confront the challenge. We examined the concept of security to reveal the various aspects of the term, including political, military, economic, ecological, social, cultural, ideological and other types of security. The causes of insecurity in Nigeria were examined to include unemployment, corruption, socio-economic imbalance, porous borders, influx of illegal arms, narcotics, slavery, criminal situations, weak internal security, injustice and nepotism, religious fanaticism and ethno-religious conflicts, gross inequality and unfairness. We considered such cases of insecurity as the Niger Delta militancy, kidnapping in the south-east of Nigeria, Jos crisis, Boko-Haram insurgency, Herdsmen aggression etc. The consequences of insecurity were examined before we dealt with the use of education to combat insecurity. We posited that a lot of the cases of insecurity derived from ignorance and so agreed that education of the formal and non-formal types would solve the problem in the long run. We then listed a broad range of content areas which curriculum workers would have to structure into existing school or out-of-school subjects in order to teach both children and adults to prepare them for a more productive livelihood in our contemporary world. Some of the prescribed content areas include entrepreneurial education, democratic/voter education, family-life education, economic independence, modest living, sound moral values, dignity of labour and productivity, religious education, rudiments of martial arts for the girl child rudiments of community policing among others .Curriculum workers are called upon to weave these content areas into existing school subjects as appropriate so that the implementations of the various curricula would result in improved security of lives and property in Nigeria.