There is need for a continuous investigation into the area of wastage in any organization especially in an educational enterprise, which deals with human beings. Wastage is the term given to anything which has lost its purpose and value. The negative effects of wastage hinge on the growth of every organization which educational system is one of them. Harlow (2003) defined the term wastage to mean careless consumption, spending, or loss of energy or vigor. Wastage is a loss resulting from breakage, decay, and handling, and leakage, shrinkage of goods or material. Understanding wastage without giving a hint on waste, from which the term wastage is coined from, is unacceptable.
Waste is a desolate, devastated, and striped, empty, hence dreary, dismal, gloomy, cheerless, lying unused, valueless, refuse, rejected as waste land, waste paper. It is also to bring rain, to devastate, to destroy, to wear away by degrees, to impair gradually, to diminish by constant loss, to use up, to spend and to wear out. It also means to spend unnecessarily or carelessly, to employ prodigally, and to expand without valuable result, to apply to useless purposes, to lavish vainly, to squander, and to cause to be lost, to destroy by scattering or injury. Material used as unworthy or unwanted. It can mean the trait of destroyed resources, (Oscar, 2001).
When the missionaries were managing Nigerian secondary schools, every thing was done efficiently. Wastage in form of examination malpractices started with the West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination managed by the West African Education Council, a clear proof that either the teacher didn’t teach well or the students didn’t listen to the teacher during lessons. By this, the effort of the teacher was wasted, including the time, the knowledge and the money spent on the said student. Aboderin (2001) identified wastages by saying that the plans of Nigeria for a better secondary education in Nigeria, is but a frustrated dream.
Educational wastage became a modern term in educational system in Nigerian Public Secondary Schools where school drop outs term was only recognized because of large student dropouts from public secondary schools in Anambra State to become traders with the view that what everyone was doing was pursuing money, even for a civil servant. The term ‘wastage’ can be seen as the failure in schools. Educational wastages are seen in children’s failure to reach large achievement levels in repetition of grades and in premature leaving,( Igbinweka, 2000).
Any student who receives education at any stage is expected to complete the education within the prescribed period. If the student withdraws from the course before completion, it results to educational wastage. So, educational wastage is the premature withdrawal of students from school. Hence, the most popular use of the word ‘wastage’ in education means the wastage of time, effort, and money (Duze, 2003).
Educational wastage manifested itself in the nation’s failure to provide universal education for all, recruit students into the system, in the failure of the system to set appropriate objectives. According to Henderson, & Mapp, (2002) educational wastage occur when there is a decrease, loss, deteriorated, damage, out of date, reduced, withdrawn, unusable, throw away, extermination, and extinction, decay of useable things or activities. Educational wastage types are repetition, drop outs and attrition. A school wasted learner is a learner who failed a given course and had to stay an extra year to learn it, while a school dropout is the learner who prematurely withdraws from school. Secondary education is the stage of learning that starts after primary stage of learning had ended.
Educational Wastage has brought many negative effects on public secondary schools in Anambra State and its environment. Derico Nwamama, Chiejina, Ototido, Akpaka and others are some of the notorious criminals, who are products of educational wastage in Onitsha as they opted out of public secondary school and were killed by Bakassi Vigilante Group. Emmanuel (2002) stated that while male school wastage in Anambra State has reached an alarming stage, banditry, prostitution became the order of the day. It also produced unemployed, uncreative youths, who will end up in crime and in death. Some people therefore least preferred to train children at home.
The major aim of education was the training of a total child and the application of knowledge in the Childs daily life, (Agogo, 2002). When the student is trained and in reality the student couldn’t use what was learnt to survive or make a career for survival in a hard economic nation, then educational wastage completed its all round negative duties in the life of the student.
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