American Journal of Educational Research, 2015, Vol. 3, No. 5, 631-636 Available online at http://pubs.sciepub.com/education/3/5/16 © Science and Education Publishing DOI:10.12691/education-3-5-16 Education and the Intentionality of a Performing Arts Educator in Nigeria Bode Ojoniyi * Drama Unit, Department of Languages and Linguistics, Osun State University, Nigeria *Corresponding author: bodetope@gmail.com Received April 12, 2015; Revised April 21, 2015; Accepted May 06, 2015 Abstract Education, particularly its form: aims, objectives and goals could be dangerous depending on the intentionality of the giver of such education. From such theory of education as “classical conditioning” and some others, we know that the form of a permitted or given education may be to programme or condition the minds of a people to always conform to a social, cultural or psychological stereotype. So, education could be a tool to force social, cultural or political conformation on a people in a subtle way. Such education makes a robot out of the people who are not really able to think through issues themselves. As a teacher, I see and deal with passive students who act like robots without original thought and native intelligence. This may be a carryover of the perversion of colonialism on their psyches and the understanding of most of the teachers and educators who took over from the colonial masters – for no doubt, their understanding, interpretation and appropriation of the interpretations of their circumstances affect and influence the form of education they have passed down to this generation. This also accounts for one of the reasons no Africa State, in spite of the available data on the primacy of mother tongue education, has reverted or officially adopted mother tongue education till today. As a Performing Artist and a teacher, my interest is therefore in using the theatre to provoke my students to social, cultural and political deconstruction of the cultural, religious and traditional ways of life that have been subtly imposed on them through educational conditioning. I have tried to do this through what I called “Theatre of Intentionality”. In this paper, therefore, based on my experience with the students in two theatre workshops, I like to explore what I perceive as the place of the theory of “dialectical texts consciousness” in analysing human intentionality in other to promote generative form of education that is capable of provoking societal transformations. Keywords: Education, Intentionality, Performing Arts Educator Cite This Article: Bode Ojoniyi, “Education and the Intentionality of a Performing Arts Educator in Nigeria.” American Journal of Educational Research, vol. 3, no. 5 (2015): 631-636. doi: 10.12691/education-3-5-16. 1. Introduction From my personal experiences of the relics of colonisation as a young boy growing up in Western Nigeria, I can give firsthand information of the subtle and unconscious damages of colonisation on the way Africans have come to perceive and understand themselves in relation to the crucial issue of identity. Such damages, especially of race and self perceptions, arise from the colonial masters’ perceptions, creations and narrations of the natives which were uncritically accepted as the true representation of the black self. I remember that anytime there is a demanding task to perform, men will be assembled and one, giving a supposedly rousing command to motivate the men to a collective action will say in a loud voice: “eees sobey”. “Eee sobey” is a corrupt form of “apes obey”! The colonial masters will yell at a group of blacks that have been assembled to carry out a task: “Apes obey”! So, “apes obey” is one of the several legacies of the colonial masters’ ways of seeing the Africans and of dealing with them. They are as mammal as apes and gorillas, no more no less. Unfortunately, as a result of this form of perception and narration, a subtle and an unconscious damage has taken place in the collective psyche of the people that from primary schools to secondary schools, teachers and instructors motivating us to carry out any challenging or daunting task are fond of yelling out as the “new educated masters”, “apes obey”. Those of us who try to “rebel” against being called “apes” by the new masters are met with cane and other forms of corporal punishments. The new masters dress and attempt to copy all the “noble” actions of their mentors including religion. The actions of our teachers, a carry-over of the colonial masters’ superiority complex, can only complete the process of the progressive damages to the understanding and the perception of the black self of the students. The black self is also further damaged by the fact that the students are not allowed to communicate in their mother-tongue. The mother-tongue in the understanding of the new masters is a colloquial speech and, by implication, it is inferior, ignoble and totally unacceptable by any civilised mind! In front of every class during my primary and secondary school days till date one will always find it boldly written: “Vernacular Speaking in this Class is Prohibited!” The language of our self; of our identity and cultural