Timi Agbale Grammar School, Ede (TAGS) marked its 60th Anniversary on October 1 2022. Below is the lecture titled Education: A Lifetime Legacy, delive
Timi Agbale Grammar School, Ede (TAGS) marked its 60th Anniversary on October 1 2022. Below is the lecture titled Education: A Lifetime Legacy, delivered by one of the alumni, Professor Adebambo Adewopo SAN.
Protocols/Intros
Prof. Bambo Adewopo SAN
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, on this momentous occasion, permit me to perform due courtesies.
* First of all, pay homage to the Royal father of the day and the first citizen of this ancient town of Ede, His Royal Highness, Oba Munirudeen Adesola Lawal, Laminisa 1, the Timi of Ede, during whose reign this institution, TAGS on which account we are all gathered here today, celebrates its diamond jubilee. Kabiyesi, may your reign be long and peaceful on the throne of your forefathers;
* The Guest of Honour, His Excellency, Senator Ademola Adeleke, an authentic son of this great town, ‘Imole Osun’, and Governor-elect of Osun State;
* The Chief Host, my friend and brother, and alumnus of this school, His Excellency Barrister Hazeem Gbolarumi, former Deputy Governor of Oyo State;
Chairman of this occasion, Alhaji Basiru Adebayo
* The body of alumni of this great school here present, Principals, Teachers and Students of this school, past and present;
* our host and the dynamic President of the TAGS Old Students Association, Dr Bola Adewara and his dedicated team of Executives;
* my Lords temporal and spiritual;
* members of the Press,
* eminent community leaders, political leaders, honourable members of the society, invited guests, and distinguished ladies and gentlemen.
It gives me great pleasure to be asked to deliver the 60th anniversary of our very dear school, TAGS.
Down the memory lane
Permit me to say right away that my anniversary address will be brief. I hesitate to commit the error of subjecting this eminent gathering to a long lecture. Besides, on this kind of occasion, there are going to be a lot of speeches and goodwill messages.
In the same vein, I must not fail to briefly highlight the role of education in society, the historical essence of this great institution, TAGS and the urgent need to preserve its legacy for posterity in the broader context of this great town of Ede, Osun state and Nigeria as a whole. Going down memory lane almost five decades ago, I walked into the boarding house of this school as a little boy and, like others before and after me, embarked on a journey to the future.
It was a gathering of everyone from every part of the country, West, East, North and South. On this very ground where we were seated, it was lush green grass, a vast landscape, which hosted many inter-house sports where talented students competed for medals, football matches, with other exciting and not-so-exciting events like punishments especially cutting of grass meted out on erring students and many memorable occasions.
Inside that dilapidated building across the field was the Assembly Hall, which hosted morning assemblies, the Principal’s and Vice Principal’s offices, the Staff room, the Library and Classrooms where teachers took turns to instruct us and impart timeless knowledge.
In the hostel, the bell would ring every morning as early as 5.30 am for the morning devotion, and off we went on different morning duties. Some of us went to the brook to fetch water for the dining hall, and some cleaned and swept.
I remember my own morning duty at the school Poultry right in front of the dining hall, where we fed chickens and parked their waste. All before classes started. After school, we had games, dinner, and prep at night before the light out. It was a regimented life where character and learning were the order of the day.
In all of this, we had dreams, and as young minds, sometimes not without pranks, but we had hopes and aspirations to become. How could we ever forget that experience of a lifetime? Every one of us presents here today passed through the grounds of this school, and we are grateful to God for sparing our lives.
Many of our fellow schoolmates have passed on. Let us pause in their honour. May their souls rest in peace! It was in Agbale where our principal, housemaster, and teachers would not tolerate any act of indiscipline. You could not look at your senior with disrespect. It was ‘obey first before complaining.
We had well-rounded training. That was the TAGS of the golden era. And when we all left, we took with us this treasure of a lifetime.
As I was coming, I was looking forward to seeing men and women who bandied together on the field, studied together night and day both in the classroom and prep, played together on the field, and on occasional social nights, slept and woke up together in the hostel for at least five years of our lives. I look out for names and faces I haven’t heard or seen since I left 41 years ago. 
Names and faces that will certainly spark moments and memories of the good and the bad of the good old days. There is a sense in which, looking back, we can see each other as brothers and sisters.
I am enthused with the idea of connecting with my classmates and delighted that today that has come to pass in our lifetime. Let us enjoy it, connect with each other, and look forward to a brighter future.
I am grateful to our President, Dr Bola Adewara, who has gone beyond the call of duty to sustain the association, tolerated the usual indiscretions that exist among different peoples and was able to forge this brotherhood. He has been such a connecting factor and a good leader, a quality my fellow classmates can readily attest to right from our Agbale days. He was an astute organizer, excellent communicator, and debater.
I recall one time we both got in trouble with a certain teacher of ours who never fancied the potentially rebellious and radical streak in a critical essay Bola, and I wrote as pioneers of the school Press Club. Such was part of the impressionable characteristics we had when men were boys who just did foolish things for nothing and cared for little.
After all, we were just kids who simply wanted to express ourselves or impress a little, or so we thought that we could ruffle the school authorities, or to some of us, just conquer the world with the gush of talent to the chagrin of our instructors who were better placed to moderate our exuberance.
As we emerged through the years, having left Agbale and faced the realities of life, we knew better, and we became better for it. We thank God we are still standing today, and on this occasion, we can celebrate our school and ourselves. It is a privilege we should not take for granted, no matter our station in life.
We have come a long way to see each other again today in our lifetime. To some of us, 10, others 20, 30, 40 or even 50 years and more. To our younger generation, feel free to connect with us and avail yourself of this shared opportunity to foster a beneficial relationship.
Legacy of Education
The role of education in society cannot be overstated. Education is as old as human civilization, and its legacy as the bedrock of human society holds true for all times as one that has been proven repeatedly. The foundation of knowledge is built on education.
The early generation of philosophers and thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others saw the pursuit of knowledge as the foundation for the flourishing of human society. Aristotle defined education as the process of training man to fulfil his aim by exercising all the faculties to the fullest extent as a member of the community. according to John Dewey, this process has no end; it has no final destination.
It is a lifelong endeavour that is meant to benefit humanity. Education equips and liberates the mind and breakers it from the yoke of ignorance. What we call the poverty of the mind is the antithesis of what education stands for. A society that does not value education does not value knowledge, and if it does not value learning, it cannot progress, nor can it guarantee happiness to its people.
The pursuit of education is the pursuit of happiness. It is education that drives the progress of modern society. This is why in every progressive society, contemporary educational approaches and practices have continued to create new opportunities and boundaries of learning to solve social problems of the moment to benefit society.
In every aspect, whether formal or informal, and in every level, elementary, secondary, vocational or technical, or at a higher level, education is the bedrock of development. Without an educated society, we cannot grow. We cannot achieve development beyond the level of our education.
In today’s world, no society can develop without a sound educational system. This is why our political leaders must address the challenges of our educational system to produce citizens who are not only capable of investigating the world around them but will solve problems and meet the needs of society.
This takes me to one of the pressing challenges in our country today – our educational system. From the primary to secondary and tertiary levels, the state of our public education leaves a lot of room to be desired with challenges that are well known to every well-meaning Nigerian, from funding to infrastructure, to training, welfare, curriculum and more, clearly our education sector in dire need for reform.
We can no longer afford our educational system to fail. Given that education is the bedrock of development and the future of any nation, the education sector must be prioritized. Our schools must return to better days. Permit me to use this occasion as the opportunity to call for urgent action and to use TAGS as a good ground and a just cause for this call.
The Agbale Legacy: A call for Action
As we are gathered here to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of TAGS, we do this with its rich history and heritage of educating generations of countrymen and women in all works of life.
In the spirit of celebrating our diamond jubilee, permit me to do our school the honour of situating it in the broader historical context: Remarkably, this school has existed for 6o years, established within the first five years of Nigeria’s Independence.
In retrospect, secondary school education in Nigeria did not commence until the 1800s with the establishment of CMS Grammar School, which is on record as the first secondary school founded in 1859 in Lagos, long before Nigeria became a country.
By 1914, the famous amalgamation year, there were less than 20 secondary schools in the whole of Nigeria. By 1960 at Independence, 62 years ago, there were a little over 100 secondary schools, both private and public.
On overall, not many secondary schools are 60 years today. Since then, the number of secondary schools has grown in leaps and bounds. By 2019, in a vast and diverse country like Nigeria with over 200 million people, over 30,000 secondary schools and over 6 million enrolled senior secondary school students, TAGS is in the top 120 secondary schools by age.
This is a no-mean achievement, indeed a landmark for a school to clock 60 years in 2022! As we can see, TAGS eminently sits in a broader historical perspective of secondary education in which, by all measures, it is a legacy institution among the second-generation secondary schools in the Independence era.
TAGS, the first and the only secondary school name, have placed Ede in Osun State on the map of early educational institutions and, by extension, generations of its students in the position to celebrate its 60th anniversary today. Let us take pride in this unique position that our rich history has placed us in.
Even more remarkable is the symbolic essence of TAGS in this ancient town of Ede. For 60 years, more than a generation now, TAGS stands in fulfilment not only of the role of education in societal development but also of what it represents. In the 60 years of its existence, TAGS has symbolized the historical and cultural identity of this ancient town.
Though it may not be the oldest school in Ede, it is the only school that bears the ancestral name and legacy of ‘Timi Agbale’, the iconic founding father of Ede and for over half a century, has carried that name to the exclusion of all others. No other school shares that honour and history.
Not by coincidence but by sheer providence, our own royal father of the day, Timi Munirudden Adesola Lawal, Laminisa 1, the amiable king who today sits on the exalted throne of his ancestors, once taught in this school. The heritage that this school holds is far too rich and precious not to preserve for posterity.
TAGS is a cultural ‘brand’ name that goes to the origin of this town. Ede, as we can see today, is no longer the same as it was 6o years ago when the school was founded by the royal charter of Timi Adetoyese Laoye, my grandfather, granted to the late Pa David Ojo Falegan, the visionary founder of TAGS, who came from Ekiti at the time.
Since then, Ede has grown in leaps and bounds, hosting institutions of higher learning. This bears eloquent testimony to how significant TAGS is to this town more than any other school and indeed to us, who belong to the entire generation of its students worldwide.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, Sadly, it is evident that with this rich history and heritage, TAGS is in ruins. It sits in the shadows of its former self, desolation and disrepair and crying for attention.
On a rather reflective note, permit me to say that, to many, if not all of us, I doubt if the mention of Timi Agbale Grammar School would not evoke streams of nostalgia or sentiment, especially among the alumni, if for no other reason than that we passed through this school and witness the state of the school as we sit here today.
This is only natural to feel such a close affinity towards a school that took a better part of our youth.
None of us can genuinely deny or erase that part of our history or youthful days as the golden era of TAGS when everything worked. However, it is no longer so because this school is not the same.
Whilst the old structures of classrooms, hostels and dining halls that stood as TAGS we knew are even worse than monuments, the territorial integrity and the landscape and all its natural habitat have been eroded by land poachers with impunity, ignorant or oblivious to the 60 years legacy to generations of those who have passed through this great school.
The state of the school is worse than we met and left it. What a rape of our sense of history and posterity. As we all know, this did not happen in one day. It has taken several years of neglect and poor management of the educational system across our country.
Today, we can see that we are all victims of this sad situation. It is no exaggeration to say that it is hard to find the state of any school worse than this anywhere. The truth is that I don’t think any of us can be proud of this or in a hurry to drive our children or grandchildren just on a visit to our alma mater.
Only recently, the President and his team made a frantic effort to save the school from totally being taken over by these land poachers and enemies of our history and education through a series of actions with the assistance of the government. Let me appeal to us to continue to keep the memories of this place close to our hearts.
This leaves the question – what do we do to redeem the situation and contribute to the continued existence of this school? We must recognize the role of the Old Students Association in the development of their alma mater, even in publicly-funded schools.
This role is supportive and collaborative with the government. While the alumni association is not unmindful of this noble role, I am also aware that government recognizes this deplorable state and is making plans to address this. Beyond the promise of action, this call is a call for urgent action. A call for collaboration to redeem the image and glory of this historic school.
Once again, I commend the President of TAGS Old Students Association and the Executives for the good work they are doing on behalf of all of us, which is certainly borne out of their love for their alma mater. I extend my warm regards to my fellow alumni, seniors, classmates, juniors, and the current student body.
On this note, I wish to express my appreciation to everyone far and near for making this occasion and contributing to the celebration of the 60th anniversary of this school and its revival into a new era moving forward from this occasion.
Thank you.
PICTURES FROM ANNUAL PRIZE-GIVING DAY
PICTURES FROM 60TH ANNIVERSARY
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