There was a time when failing an examination could partly be blamed on the scarcity of knowledge. Books were expensive. Libraries were poorly stocked. A student in a village could spend weeks searching for a particular textbook or journal and still return empty-handed.

That excuse is becoming harder to defend. Today, a student with a smartphone and an internet connection can sit in a Nigerian village and take a course from Harvard, Cambridge or any number of the world’s leading universities. Books, journals, lectures, tutorials, quizzes and explanations of almost every subject imaginable are available online, many of them free.

Yet students are still failing examinations. The question is not whether knowledge is available. It is whether we have taught our young people how to find it, use it and learn from it.

I know what it means to learn when knowledge is scarce. I attended a village school where the knowledge gap between teachers and students was often very small. In high school, many of my teachers were school leavers, Higher School Certificate holders or graduates of teacher-training colleges. We had a few university graduates, but some had been teaching for so long that their own learning had become stale.
The school library was not much better. Its books were old and getting current materials was difficult.

But serious students found ways around the problem. At Ogharefe in Ethiope West, Delta State, we travelled to nearby Sapele to buy books. We searched for supplementary materials to make up for what we could not get from our teachers. Good study habits made a difference.
At Ogwashi-Uku Polytechnic, where I studied Mass Communication, access to books was even more difficult. The course was not widely available in Nigerian higher institutions in the early 80s, and the school itself was relatively new. We depended heavily on materials provided by our lecturers.

When I got to Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, in the mid-1980s to study Economics, things improved. But even there, most of the books available were old. In my final year, I travelled to the universities of Benin, Ibadan, Lagos and Lagos State University searching for materials for my project.

Then the internet arrived and changed the rules. In the early 2000s, I became a member of the British Council Library in Lagos. It had a physical library and a digital library. For the first time, I experienced what seemed like a paradise of knowledge: access to current books, journals and magazines from around the world.
My wife was studying for a master’s degree in humanitarian and refugee studies at the University of Lagos, while I was involved in a Pan-African telecommunications study. Through the digital library, I could obtain materials for both of us and for our children.
Sometimes, the resources available to me were better than those available to some of the university lecturers. My wife’s assignments occasionally contained references that surprised her lecturers. Some even recommended her work to her classmates.

Then came the explosion of online learning. Universities began offering Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Knowledge that once required money, travel and access to a good library could now be reached from a computer or phone.
I embraced it. In my twilight years, I am still taking online courses. I have certificates from more than 14 courses and I am still counting. Some cost nothing. Others require payment, but usually a small amount compared with the knowledge gained.

I have watched this access benefit young people close to me. When my daughter was preparing her final-year project, I found a free University of Cambridge course on project writing and encouraged her to take it. She did. She later made an A in her project defence.
When my sister-in-law’s son was preparing to study Law, I downloaded materials from free Harvard University courses for him. It gave him a head start, which he maintained until he was called to the Nigerian Bar on July 10, 2026.

I am not telling these stories to celebrate myself or my family. I am making a simple point: the tools for learning have never been this accessible.
Unfortunately, our classrooms have not changed at the same pace.
We still have students spending valuable classroom time copying notes from blackboards or taking dictation. That is a poor use of technology and an even poorer use of a teacher’s time.
Notes can be prepared and shared digitally. Classroom time can then be used for discussion, questions, experiments, quizzes and helping students understand difficult concepts.

Teachers can also make use of the millions of educational videos available online. A good video can sometimes explain in minutes what several pages of text struggle to convey.
Students, too, must take responsibility. The smartphone that carries TikTok, YouTube and WhatsApp can also carry a university classroom. The same internet used to watch comedy can be used to learn mathematics, economics, coding, medicine, history or law.
There are applications that can summarise books, explain difficult concepts, turn written materials into audio and help students revise through quizzes. There are online courses from universities and learning platforms across the world.
Entertainment is not the enemy. But when entertainment consumes the time that should have been spent learning, it becomes a problem.

So, why are students still failing? The internet has not abolished the need for discipline, good teachers or hard work. It has, however, removed many of the excuses that confronted my generation.
Nigeria needs to rethink the entire learning process. We are behind, but we are not doomed. We have intelligent young people. What they need are better teachers, better learning systems and the confidence to use technology as a serious tool for intellectual growth.

For my generation, knowledge was something we had to chase. For today’s students, much of it is chasing them.They only need to stop scrolling long enough to catch it.

Mr. Adjekuko is a Trustee of The Education Champions League (ECL). His views do not represent those of the organization. He can be reached at [email protected].