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THE CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY has several definitions for youth, the most appropriate for this write up being "the period between childhood and full manhood or womanhood." In the plural, youth means "young people collectively."
Beyond sharing a common definition, Nigerian youth constitute a mixed bag. Most come from rural backgrounds, many are urban dwellers. Many come from homes where neither parent is literate, while a few come from homes where one if not both parents are university graduates. Many wallow below the poverty line while a few live in conspicuous affluence. Most receive all their education from ill-equipped public schools, while some are chauffeur-driven to state-of-the-art private schools, from kindergarten through secondaiy education.
The universal primaiy-education programmes of Western Nigeria, Eastern Nigeria and later the Federal Government opened the doors to basic education for millions of young people. The state take-over of schools from the missions and private proprietors immediately after the end of the Civil War in the early 1970s triggered off a serious decline in the quality of education available to the youth. The economic recession of the 1980s, which brought with it the imposition of an import licence on books, compounded matters, making books inaccessible and unaffordable to the majority of the youth. The visible drop in standards in the public education system ushered in private 'international' schools at nurseiy/primary/secondaiy levels, particularly in uiban environments, which offer quality education, but at costs beyond the reach of the common man. The twenty-first centuiy has ushered in an era of private universities, some owned by churches, some by fabulously rich individual Nigerians!
This background has been provided because it is crucial to our consideration of the reading culture of contemporaiy Nigerian youth, who can be classified into three groups for this purpose. Group One, which constitutes the majority, are illiterate or semi-literate. They have no reading culture, because they lack the language facility to enable and encourage them to read. This group includes school dropouts, young people who never went to school, and young people automatically promoted through the public primaiy -school system who cannot read with ease in any language. The second group comprises young people who passed through the public school system and are able to acquire the language facility, usually in...