Nigerian society is bedeviled by corruption and injustice, whose prevalence may be partly explained by the dominant educational systems in the country. Paulo Freire has suggested that unjust systems are sustained by educational systems that condition learners to accept injustice. He also indicts the church for supporting such educational systems. He proposes the problem-posing education that helps learners to question and act against the conditions of their oppression to gain freedom from such conditions. This article proposes that, as the Bible enjoins us to “train up a child in the way that he should go” (Prov 22:6), and Jesus Christ often posed problems to encourage learners to think and act, Freire’s problem-posing approach is a good model for Christian educators to use in nurturing justice and righteousness in Nigeria, Africa, and the entire world.

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In Africa, there is a wide gap between the faith claims of many people who attend church and their lifestyles. Moreover, there is little reflection of the African perspective in the few writings on Christian education that exist in Africa. This paper proposes that an examination of African traditional approaches to education will afford Christian education a means of becoming more effective, especially in Africa. Lessons are drawn for this purpose from golmo, an educational procedure among the Lelna of Kebbi State in Nigeria.

Many of the approaches to education found in traditional settings in Africa, though largely abandoned today in favor of modern approaches, can be shown to contain some principles being espoused in modern education. Exploration of African traditional forms of education will therefore yield ideas that are helpful to learning in Africa today. This paper explores possibilities for doing Christian education using opportunities provided by the corn-threshing activities of the Lelna of Kebbi State in Nigeria. This is important because for a long time to come many of the recipients of Christian education among the Lelna of Kebbi State of Nigeria, much like other groups in Nigeria, will live in rural areas and practice traditional forms of education.