Signing Out Or Signing Off? The Government, The Teachers, And A Question Of Justice

You cannot take the rod from the teacher's hand and then punish the teacher for the child's behaviour.

A video surfaced on the internet not long ago, and it spread with the speed that only truly scandalous content achieves on Nigerian social media. In it, students — secondary school students just completing their West African Senior School Certificate Examination — were captured engaging in conduct that was, by any reasonable moral standard, indecent, raunchy, and entirely unbefitting of young people at the threshold of one of the most consequential periods of their academic lives. The occasion? What is now popularly described as a "signing out" ceremony. The platform? The very school premises where these students had spent years being formed and guided.

The Ondo State Government responded swiftly and, in the view of many observers, appropriately. Seventeen identified students are to be sanctioned. Their results are to be withheld. Their names are to be entered into their respective schools' black books as a matter of official record. Students who were present but did not sit the examination and are deemed accomplices in the conduct have been expelled. On all of this, there is broad agreement: Nigeria cannot afford to treat moral recklessness in its schools as a spectator sport, and a deterrent was necessary. So far, so reasonable.

But then came the detail that prompted this article. Senior officers of the three schools identified in the video have been served queries. The reason, as gathered from the government's pronouncement, is essentially that they failed to prevent the incident — failed, in other words, to stop a celebration they did not organise, did not approve, and by every visible indication, were not privy to in the first place. And it is here, precisely here, that this conversation must be had. Because this is not simply a story about a viral video or student indiscipline. It is a story about the systematic, unrelenting, and frankly unconscionable practice of making teachers bear the consequences of a system they have been deliberately disarmed from managing.

Before we go further, it is worth pausing on the phenomenon of signing out itself, because it deserves interrogation that it rarely receives. Signing out — the tradition of a farewell ceremony to mark the completion of a stage of education — has its origins, and its legitimacy, at the level of higher education. It is the celebration of a degree, a completed academic programme, a substantial intellectual and personal achievement that has tested the graduate over several years. The debate about whether Ordinary National Diploma holders should participate in this tradition has been ongoing for some time, and there are sincere arguments on both sides. But what feat, precisely, is a secondary school student celebrating when they sign out?

The WAEC examination is not the end of anything. It is, at best, the end of the beginning. The student who dances out of secondary school still has the UTME ahead of them. Then Post-UTME. Then semester examinations, sometimes spanning four to six years. Then SIWES or industrial training. Then teaching practice, if they are on that track. Then a research project. Then, finally, a degree — which is the point at which a signing out ceremony carries its full and earned meaning. To celebrate with the fervour and the abandon of a completed journey at the very point where the journey is only just beginning is not merely premature. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what education is for and where one stands within it. The culture of signing out at secondary school level needs to be examined, challenged, and in the form it has now taken, firmly discouraged.

But back to the teachers — because it is their situation that is most immediately unjust and most urgently in need of public attention. The viral video, disturbing as it was, did not show a school-organised event. There was no programme, no stage, no microphone stand arranged by staff. What it showed was the kind of spontaneous, peer-driven conduct that students engage in precisely because they believe no adult authority is watching. The signing out culture in its current form thrives in the gaps between official school activity, not within it. To hold teachers and school officers responsible for an act they neither planned nor sanctioned nor, in all reasonable probability, witnessed in time to prevent, is to hold them accountable for a standard of omniscience that no institution can demand of any human being.

And yet, there is something even more troubling beneath the surface of this query than the unfairness of the immediate punishment. It is the breathtaking irony of the government's position. Because this is the same government — not Ondo State alone, but the collective institutional voice of governance in Nigerian education — that decided, some years ago, that teachers could no longer apply corporal punishment to erring students. The policy is well known. The intention behind it — to protect children from abuse — is understandable and, in principle, not without merit. But the execution has produced a reality that those who designed the policy appear not to have fully thought through.

When the cane was taken from the teacher's hand, it was not replaced with anything equally effective. What took its place was a vacuum — a disciplinary vacuum that students, and some parents, have filled with something far more dangerous: the understanding that the teacher cannot touch them, cannot truly sanction them, and can be reported to authorities if they try too hard. The result has been a gradual but unmistakable erosion of the teacher's authority in the classroom and on the school premises. Students who once understood and respected clear limits now test those limits daily, knowing that the teacher's options for meaningful response are severely constrained. The indiscipline we see in schools today — the disrespect, the misconduct, the viral signing out videos — did not emerge from nowhere. It grew, quietly and steadily, in the space that government policy created and then left unmanaged.

It is against this backdrop that the queries served to school officers must be understood in their full absurdity. The government that removed the teacher's primary disciplinary tool is now punishing the teacher for the indiscipline that followed. The authority that told teachers they could not correct students in certain ways is now holding them responsible for the behaviour of students who have not been corrected. This is not governance. It is the passing of a burden — the offloading of institutional responsibility onto the shoulders of the people least empowered to carry it.

And there is one more question that this situation raises — a question that deserves to be asked plainly and publicly. If the teachers who serve as loco parentis, the legal and moral parents-in-place, are being served queries for what these students did, what is the government's response to the biological parents? The parents who raised these children, who formed their values and their sense of limits long before any school teacher ever met them? Are they receiving queries? Are they being sanctioned? Or are they, as one is tempted to suspect, receiving nothing more than a quiet pat on the back while the teachers absorb, once again, the full weight of a failure that belongs to everyone?

Teachers are not machines. They are not policy-absorbing instruments designed to produce perfect outcomes regardless of what tools they are given or denied. They are human beings — with blood in their veins, families to tend, and personal dignities to protect. They have answered a calling that this society increasingly treats as a burden rather than an honour. They show up every day in classrooms that are underfunded, overcrowded, and under-resourced, and they give what they have. And when things go wrong — as things in any human institution will sometimes go wrong — they are the first to be blamed and the last to be defended.

This article is not a defence of indiscipline. The students in that video behaved badly, and appropriate consequences are warranted. But justice, to be justice, must be applied consistently. If we are holding teachers accountable for student conduct, we must first restore to teachers the authority and the tools to shape that conduct. We cannot have it both ways. We cannot strip the teacher of power and then punish them for powerlessness.

The Ondo State Government's intervention showed that Nigeria still has the capacity to act with moral resolve when the situation demands it. That same resolve must now be directed at a more fundamental question: why are teachers, in this country, always at the receiving end? The profession that makes every other profession possible deserves better than to be the default scapegoat of a system that has consistently failed to support it. Restore the teacher's authority. Respect the teacher's humanity. And the next time something goes wrong in a school, ask the right questions before reaching for the query letter.

OGUNJOBI Temitope Emmanuel is a TRCN certified English Educator and a postgraduate student of English. A member of the English Language Teachers Association of Nigeria (ELTAN), he writes from Lagos.