She has passion for working with kids in particular, which is fueled by her awareness that every child is unique and should therefore be nurtured along their natural path. She believes that school should be a place where thoughts, ideas, skills and talents are acknowledged, respected, identified and nurtured and also give room to kids for exploration in creating opportunities that lead to real fulfilment and purposeful living.
She is working on expanding this passion for education to the full remodeling of the Nigerian Educational System in order to make it more empowering for learners.
In addition to her work with Next Century, Rahmat is presently working as a Community Development Officer with a Federal Government regulatory agency in Nigeria where she leads the Community Liaison & Engagement Team in the department mandated to regulate the Midstream and Downstream activities of the Petroleum Industry in Nigeria.
She is married with kids and currently lives in Abuja, Nigeria.
Her Story & Journey
Growing up, I used to have flash images of the world in commotion from huge firestorm and me diving in as a super girl to save people from it. I have also always known myself as a deeply thoughtful girl with a lot of questions about human creations, life purpose, way of life, human potentials, human biases, injustice and of course, the educational system. Particularly, I really do question why our educational system should be the way it is and why every child must be subjected to one kind of learning model and each learner rated against another without consideration to the struggles, strength and weaknesses of each.
I also used to wonder why some children should be given a prize and be celebrated for doing well in some subjects like mathematics while others are ignored, regardless of their worth and relevance in the unique nature of the learners. I see this as unfair and inconsiderate.
Part of my story is that I had a terrible experience at the very beginning of my schooling. My primary 1 teacher was someone I considered as a mean person. I later believed she just didn’t know how to handle a lot of us, so some of us saw her as a bad, partial and very inconsiderate person. Her seemingly mean, rigid and unpleasant attitude made me to dislike school, became unnecessarily fearful, quiet and withdrawn. This experience stunted my growth. I was however lucky to regain my confidence through another teacher later in my school life who took me to the front of the class, held my hand up and said “she’s your leader, respect her”. This gave me a 360o turn-around in my performance which contributed to most of my educational achievements afterwards.
Another part of my story is that I believed that doing well in school, getting a job and saving money well would make me become rich. However, after graduating excellently well, getting a job and spending about 16 years on my career as a Public Servant, I still struggle with living the life of my dream even though I have a good savings habit.
I can also call myself a multi-dimensional being because of my many genuinely connected and unconnected interests and skills such as money management, charity work, fun and adventure, psychology, writing, counselling, spirituality, beneficial knowledge, excellence, cake, silence, confidentiality, empathy, respect and justice, amongst others. I can say that all of these and many more contribute to my joy in life. Therefore, I believe that it is not right for anyone to be boxed into one-type of endeavor or activity in life. People should be allowed to thrive, be and become with the combination of different endeavor they are passionate about in as much as it is ethical.
I had a paradigm shift that really supports my inner truth when I did a course in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) in 2019. There, I realized that my not being able to reach the life of my dream was due to some beliefs I had held since I was a child around money, business, life style and making impact. I realized that most of our behaviours are fully formed as early as age 9 and these behaviours are shaped by our education, our family backgrounds, our environment and our significant emotional experiences, so all of these have also influenced this belief I held true.
With all of these experiences and changes that have contributed to where I am today, I therefore hold the belief that, if well nurtured, every child has the potential of doing well in life and in any endeavor they are passionate about, especially if groomed along their natural path. I also know that we all have diverse likes, unique skills and abilities, as I say dynamism makes life rich and fulfilling, therefore everyone should enjoy equal recognition, acknowledgement and celebration. This, I believe will improve self-esteem which is necessary to make children thrive better.
So, since coming to the realization that the educational system that most of our schools are designed upon focuses more on academic skill, but cares less about the uniqueness of each learner, I therefore came up with Next Century Education to bridge the gap left open by the school system by starting with educating children on how to use their skills, ideas and talents to make money, make impact and make the society a better place for us all, especially right from a young age.
My perspective about school is that it should help to nurture thoughts, ideas, talents and give room for exploration in creating opportunities that lead to real fulfilment and purposeful living. I also believe that one of the purposes that school is meant to fulfill is developing skills and making the skills instantly enterprising for the child. That way, the children’s creative, analytic thinking and problem solving skills would be better developed as they would always ask questions such as “what benefits can I give or get with this learning?”, “what problem can I solve with this skill?” or “what purpose can this serve?”
Moreover, the world is dynamic, evolving and changing rapidly with time. Consequently, most current learnings will be useless in few years to come, so why wait till that future when we will get to discover that most of what was learnt few years back was only useful for that time and new learnings are required for the current time and challenges. It’s sheer foolishness to me. Yes, there are the basics that are unchanging, like the basic mathematics and languages but they also need immediate application for proper understanding. So why waste time gathering knowledge for the future that is already changing when that same knowledge can be used to make impact now?
Education is for now as well as for the future. It should be about using what is currently being learnt now to birth solutions to current challenges, while also using it to develop a path for the future. So, it only makes sense to catch children and their uniqueness when they are still very young, so that they can contribute to the transformation of the world along its contemporary needs and challenges while also giving them fulfilment.
We are all meant to serve, so coming up with Next Century Education concept is one of the ways I have chosen to use to serve as I do not want children to go through this angst that I and a lot of grown-ups went through or are still going through in adulthood to figure out how to start living their dream life.
I look forward to our journey together.