A documentary investigation into how obedience, punishment and inherited colonial ideas continue to shape the experience of children in Nigerian schools.
Slide 2 of 4: Students along a school corridor during documentary production.
The project
The film enters Nigerian public schools through the experiences of the people inside them, asking what education is teaching beyond the formal curriculum, and what kind of citizen it is quietly producing.
Home Training is a documentary investigation into the Nigerian education system through the lived experiences of children, teachers, parents and school communities.
At its centre is a simple but deeply revealing question: what do Nigerians mean when they speak about a child having ‘home training’, and how has that idea become connected to obedience, punishment, silence, respectability and institutional discipline?
The documentary examines whether what is commonly defended as Nigerian tradition is entirely indigenous, or whether much of it has been shaped by the colonial school system.
It traces formal education from missionary schools and colonial ordinances to the continued use of uniforms, corporal punishment, rote memorisation, language restrictions, authoritarian classrooms and social exclusion. It asks how a system designed to produce obedient clerks, interpreters, labourers and subordinate colonial subjects continues to influence the education of Nigerian children today.
Is Nigerian education raising confident, imaginative, skilled and socially responsible citizens, or is it still reproducing the obedient colonial subject?
The film seeks to reclaim ‘home training’ from its association with fear and unquestioning submission. True education should not break the spirit of a child. It should develop dignity, curiosity, cultural confidence, practical intelligence, critical thought and the ability to participate fully in society.
Nigeria cannot reform education without confronting the colonial assumptions that continue to shape it. To build a better system, the country must recover the functional strengths of indigenous education while embracing the scientific, technological and creative demands of the modern world.
The documentary is not only a critique of the past and present. It is a search for an education system that genuinely belongs to the children and communities it is meant to serve.
True education should not break the spirit of the child. It should develop dignity, curiosity, cultural confidence and critical thought.
Visual material
These photographs document the making of Home Training inside Nigerian public schools. They are behind-the-scenes images, not staged film stills.
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