The story is told of how a very demanding child had expected a special present on the occasion of his 21st birthday from his parents.

After a thought, the parents had thought of enhancing the spiritual footing of their son while at the same time offering him something for which he could have a live-long appreciation. They bought a Bible and into it they fitted a cheque of some FCFA 10 million, money enough to offer him a state-of-the-art car.

At a public function during which the parents were to make public their offer, great was their surprise to find that their son, at the pick of the celebration and to the view of all the guests present, threw off the Bible, questioning whether that was all his parents had thought was worth a birthday gift.

If he had as much as even opened a page of the Bible, he might have found out that he was in the presence of a huge beneficence! This story is about the benefits one can obtain from reading, even if simply for pleasure; whereas huge opportunities exist by way of improving one’s educational standing by reading every available material.

Cameroonians simply do not read! A reading culture does not exist! And the commemoration of another day devoted to reading blatantly confirmed that shameful reality. A number of senior government officials and other actors of the educational process met at the Yaounde public reading centre a few days ago to confirm the situation.

For all too long, we had simply thought it was the opinion of the man on the street; but when senior officials of all the government departments, stretching the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors were sounding rather unusually unanimous about the scandalous situation, there is every reason to start crying about the direction our country is taking…

Inexorably that of backwardness, because one cannot explain what role an uneducated citizenry can play in the process of national advancement.

The educational system has to take a stern blame for the situation. In the years of yore, the primary school programme began with emphasis on reading. You would say the “man-and-a-pan” exercises were meant at pronouncing exclusively; but they encouraged a reading culture, especially in the higher classes where there were very interesting stories which children would struggle to read, informing themselves, but above all, training themselves in reading habits as well.

The well-furnished college libraries and the compulsory reading of at least one novel a week as was the case in many secondary schools, is today material for tales by grandpa or grandma. MCQs have replaced the old system where students’ capacity to address a broad spectrum of knowledge through reading and by writing out texts has disappeared.

Pedagogues are at daggers’ drawn trying to say which of the systems is better. But the time we used to determine the seriousness of a student from the time he or she spent in the college library has literally run out.

Reading is no longer for educational purposes. The job market situation has imposed a new mode: going out for just what is necessary for a competitive examination, for a job or reading just what would help for an certificate examination as proposed by numerous examination questions.

Knowledge henceforth has very limited frontiers; limited almost exclusively to what would be useful and no more! In this state of affairs, one is bound to regret the absence of an intellectual debate from within which progressive ideas can emerge to enable our country select the most useful for its socio-economic advancement.

The educational system cannot continue to remain indifferent to this degenerating situation. Local councils, which are the closest governing entities too cannot continue to behave as if it was not a matter of great concern; because in the past some of the best known public libraries were run by councils. What became of them?

The Cameroon of 2035 to which we all aspire, must be one which promotes a reading culture and must be seen to be rescuing the decline in reading habits observed today.