CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
1.1Background to the Study    
Nutrition is fundamental to developing a sense of well-being and to meeting the growth, development, and activity needs of healthy, confident children and young people. Readiness to learn is enhanced when the learners are well nourished. There is considerable evidence linking children’s nutrition to educational outcomes. If children are malnourished, have nutritional deficiencies or are obese, then their learning is likely to be affected.
Adesina (2009) comments that education at all level is a delicate issue, which serves as a way forward to every society – especially in a developing nation like Nigeria. Advanced countries have improved their standard of living by education, which is considered to stimulate economic and technological development; thus, education can be regarded as an investment that yields dividends in terms of overall development of a country (Adesina, 2009). Formal education started in Nigeria during the colonial period. It developed from the early forms of reading, writing and arithmetic (i.e. the three ‘r’s) to a stage where the London Genera Certificate of Education, Ordinary Level Syllabus (the so-called O-Level) was used to guide instruction in secondary schools (Fafunwa, 1974). These secondary ‘grammar schools’ were fashioned in such a way that did not accommodate the vocational technical subjects, and as a consequence trade centers and colleges were established. Here, the City and Guild (Intermediate) syllabus was used to guide instruction and upon completion, successful students were awarded the City and Guild (Intermediate) Certificate of London. The Federal Craft Certificate or the Ministry of Labour Trade Test Certificate also was awarded to successful candidates. The Federal Craft and Trade Test Programs were put in place by the Federal Government of Nigeria mainly to improve the understanding and competencies of artisans and technicians.
In view of the fact that most of our youths pass through the secondary grammar schools (as the trade colleges were fewer in number), following the political independence of Nigeria, there was a realization that the type of education our colonial masters left with us needed a critical reexamination of the worth: of content, objectives, relevance, methods, administration, evaluation, and so forth. According to Ezeobata (2010), this period saw a state of affairs in Nigeria education where every subject had to ‘prove its usefulness’ to retain a place in the school curriculum. Probably, this was what led the then National Educational Research Council (NERC) to convey an historic curriculum conference at Lagos in 1969, which Okeke (1981, p. 10)has described as “a culmination of people’s dissatisfaction with uncertainty of the aims of education.” This conference recommended new set of goals and provided directions for major curriculum revision upon which the National Policy on Education of 1977 and the revised policy in 1981 was based.
Against this background of national aspirations, a new educational system commonly referred to as the 6-3-3-4’ system of education emerged. Among other innovations, the sytem provided for pre-vocational and vocational curricular offerings at the junior and senior secondary schools respectively. For the first time in the history of education in Nigeria, vocational and technical education subjects were, as a matter of national policy, to be offered side by side, and hopefully, enjoy parity in esteem with the ‘more academic’ courses hitherto run by the secondary grammar schools under the old colonial-based system of education.
To this end, the national curriculum on Agriclture, Introductory Technology, Home Economics, Business Studies (Junior Secondary School Level), Agricultural Science, Clothing and Textile, Home Mangement, Food and Nutrition, Typewriting & Shorthand, Principles of Accounts, Commerce, Woodwork, Technical Drawing, Basic Electronics, and Auto-Mechanics came into being in Nigerian Secondary schools. As one of the innovations that should distinguish the products of the new system from the old, school work was now based on these curricula in both private and public secondary schools from 1982 – driven by the government’s directive that post-primary schools shold be more comprehensive, which the National Policy on Education had earlier proposed in 1981.