Like much of education, this terrain is contested.
As I have noted, Africa has also seen important experiments and innovations in
education. In the late 1960s Tanzania rejected manpower planning in favor of
education for self reliance. At independence the pressing national need, it was
thought, was Tanzanians with higher level skills to fill the posts of departing
Europeans and to branch out in new directions. Since available resources did
not permit rapid expansion in all fields, allocations were to be directed by
projections of specific skills needs. As the 1960s proceeded, Tanzania's
leaders became increasingly critical of that approach, primarily because it
constrained the expansion of primary education, that most visible of the fruits
of independence. The country was focusing major resources on a small part of
the population, Tanzania's president Julius Nyerere noted, creating an arrogant
elite detached from their social roots. Scarce resources ought to be redirected
toward those who had little or no education rather than concentrated on those
who had the most, and the most alienating, education. Reversing the earlier
orientation, Nyerere's widely read and cited paper, Education for Self‑Reliance,
shifted the emphasis to primary and adult education." Schools were to
become community institutions, intimately connected with the patterns and
rhythms of the local setting. Schools were also to have farms and workshops,
both to value directly productive activities and to generate supplementary
income. produc‑ tion brigades in Botswana also sought to integrate
learning and the local setting by creating community schools in which learners
and teachers were also to be producers." In the effort to expand access
rapidly, several African countries experimented with different models of pre‑service
and in‑service teacher education. Others‑Zimbabwe's efforts stand
out‑‑‑explored how to draw effectively on the local setting
to develop lessons and materials for teaching science where laboratories did
not exist or were poorly equipped. More recently, dispersed and locally managed
teachers resource centers have proved to be an effective strategy for providing
continuing support to instructional staff. Imaginative and energetic literacy
campaigns brought rapid progress in several countries. Innovative community‑based
non‑school education programs have emerged across Africa, often with the
support of a local or international non‑governmental organization.
Though materially poor, several of Africa's higher
education institutions have been intellectually very rich, exploring ideas and constructs with contacts and
influences around the world. Ghana, for example, nurtured the rejuvenation of
studies and debates about pan‑Afticanism. In seminars, in their research,
and in major student holiday
research projects scholars at the University of Dar es Salaam explored the
claims and problems and refined the methods of oral history, thereby joining
and advancing an international debated among professional historians.
Recognizing the importance of interchanges across
Africa, especially since it has often been easier for African scholars to
communicate with colleagues in Europe than with colleagues in a neighboring
country, researchers have established several continent‑wide
organizations. Among them, the African Association of Political Science,
founded in Dar es Salaam in 1973, has regularly brought scholars together,
published a journal, provided modest funding to assist participation in
international meetings, and generally challenged Africa's political scientists
to be critical and to cooperate. Two parallel networks link education
researchers in West and Central Africa and in Eastern and Southern Africa,
concerned especially with the role of research in making public policy. Several
research institutes and centers have sought to provide a venue for critical
research and debate and to support both established and younger scholars, among
them the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa
(Dakar) and SAPES Trust (Harare).
The general point here is that across a parched and
bleak landscape, education innovation and experimentation have periodically
flourished in Africa. Some initiatives have had very wide recognition and
influence. Most, however, have found it difficult to survive after the
founders' departure or after the exhaustion of the initial funding. Although
foreign funds have periodically supported reforms and experiments, rarely has
that support been directed toward initiatives with strong local roots and
effective organic local participation. Indeed, overall, aid dependence has
generally discouraged experimentation, especially where proposed activities
have been oriented toward broad national political and social goals rather than
more narrowly defined instructional tasks.
Setting Education Policy
Education policy and agenda setting in Africa have
taken many forms, from broadly inclusive to narrowly authoritarian." The
inherited model was distinctly bureaucratic, oriented more toward control and
management than toward innovation and development, a pattern that has been
widely retained and reinforced. In some countries key individuals, often the
education minister but occasionally the head of state, has played the central
role in defining problems and charting directions. In other countries, select
commissions, sometimes composed primarily of educators and other times of
senior politicians, gathered evidence, commissioned studies, and recommended
new policies. In still other settings, a major national conference (in
Francophone Africa, etats‑generaux) provided opportunities for the
diverse interests of the education community to present their views and
construct coalitions to support particular policies. Some countries have
employed several different strategies.
Policy is also made through practice. Indeed, as we
consider education policy making, it is essential not to equate policy with
official statements that may have little or no influence on what actually
occurs. Most of the writing on public policy focuses on formal pronouncements
by authoritative institutions. Since making policy is assumed to be the
prerogative of those in power, that literature studies elites and formal
documents. Most often, this perspective under, stands policy making as a
sequence of activities and feedback loops, moving from vision to formulation to
negotiation to policy specification and announcement to implementation to
evaluation. This understanding of policy is widely shared and regularly
asserted in Africa.
Yet, policy is made as much‑‑or often a
good deal more‑in practice as by pronouncement. Consider, for example,
policy on language of instruction. The education ministry may have formal
rules, publicly announced and officially recorded, specifying that instructors
are to use a particular language to teach certain subjects. Suppose, however,
that an on‑site study shows that 90% of the instructors use other
languages to teach those subjects. When asked, a school principal might say
that "our policy in this school is to use the language that our students
understand. To do otherwise will make their examination marks even worse."
What, then, is the policy? From one perspective, the policy is what the
ministry has promulgated, and what the teachers do is a deviation from official
policy. From the other perspective, the actual policy‑that is, the
working rules that guide behavior‑is what the teachers are doing. In this
view, the ministry documents are just that: official statements that may or may
not be implemented and certainly not guides to what people actually do. Stated policy may thus be very different
from policy in practice.
Recognizing that policy results from practice as
well as from official pronouncements helps us identify other major influences
on education policy in Africa. Increased reliance on foreign funding has
expanded the direct role of both the finance ministry, which generally manages
all external aid, and the funding and technical assistance agencies, whose own
agendas have come to guide and constrain education initiatives and reforms in
Africa. Explicit conditions attached to foreign aid may require particular
policies or priorities, for example attention to educating females. Even where
there are no explicit conditions of that sort and where foreign aid is a very
small portion of total national spending on educa‑ tion, external
influence can still be decisive. Consciously or unconsciously, African policy
and decision makers shape their programs and projects, and thus policies and
priorities, to fit what seems most likely to secure foreign funding. As the
Director of Planning in Tanzania's education ministry explained, planning had
in fact become marketing." His task was less a process of exploring needs
and developing strategies to address them than an effort to study the market of
prospective funders, identifying its priorities and value points, and then to
use that market knowledge to craft, adver‑ tise, and sell projects and programs. That was perhaps an
effective coping strategy in difficult circumstances. Still, it entrenched the
funding agencies' role in setting national education policies and priorities.
As well, it reinforced the status and influence of a particular set of actors
within the country, not those with the clearest or most dynamic educa. tion
vision or those with the most solid
national political base but rather those who proved to be most effective in securing foreign funding. In these
ways aid dependence becomes a vehicle for internalizing within African
education establishments externally set policies, priorities, and
understandings. While human capital theory and treating education as an
investment in the development of human capital have clearly external origins,
among their most energetic advocates have become Africa's educators.
Education and the State
The state in Africa has come to play a major role
in the processes of accumulation and legitimacy." Sometimes on behalf of
an emerging indigenous bourgeoisie and often in the absence of local
capitalists capable of controlling the national political economy and in the
context of a continuing dominant role of foreign capital, the state in Africa
assumes responsibility for fostering and managing the accumulation and
reinvestment of capital that are essential both for economic growth and
development and for the security of the tenure of the national leadership. In
practice, that often requires the African state to manage conditions for
accumulation that are largely specified externally (structural adjustment
programs are the most recent example). As it does so, the African state must at
the same time maintain its own legitimacy. As students of industrialized
capitalist states have stressed, there is a necessary tension between
legitimacy and accumulation.
Within a peripheral capitalist economy with fragile
political authority, accumulation requires a relatively weak, poorly
integrated, and politically disorganized labor force. A liberal democratic
capitalist system requires even more: a state that can successfully present
itself as universal, representative of the popular will rather than an agent of
the dominant class(es). The policies the state pursues to maintain its
universalist image, however, threaten its ability to manage, or even assist,
accumulation. Each arena in which citizen participation is encouraged, and in
which some degree of democratic choice is permitted, becomes a point of
potential vulnerability for the state itself, and for the capitalist order.
Promoting legitimacy through controlled democratic practice‑which surely
has been occurring in Africa‑risks threatening the accumulation process.
Empowered peasants may organize and demand greater control over both the
organization of production and the distribution of wealth. At the same time,
facilitating accumulation by constraining participation‑which has also
occurred in Africa‑undermines legitimacy.
Accumulation is particularly problematic for the
leadership of peripheral conditioned capitalist states25.
As Fanon foresaw, the structural interests of Africa's post‑colonial
leadership maintained and reinforced their dependence." Notwithstanding
the rhetoric that accompanied decolonization, the agenda of most of those who
assumed office at the departure of the European rulers was neither radical
transformation of the peripheral economy nor the risk‑taking required for
capitalist innovation. Fragile states with insecure elites were disinclined or
unable to take a long term view of what national development would require and
reluctant to make a continuing investment in a skilled, disciplined, and
accountable public service. 27 One consequence has been a constellation of
interests and power that found it difficult to create conditions conducive to
accumulation and sustained investment in the development of new production and
productive capacity. Another consequence has been a generally inefficient and
not infrequently corrupt adminis‑ tration. For education, this situation
has been manifested in ineffective use of the limited resources available.
Facilitates are poorly maintained. Even when prepared and printed,
instructional materials often do not reach students. Funds are poorly managed,
both nationally and locally, with little accountability and reliable oversight.
Inefficiency becomes normal, both expected and tolerated.
This tension between accumulation and legitimacy is
regularly reflected in education policy, perhaps the most contested of public
policies. Establishing and managing the conditions for accumulation favor
regarding education instrumentally, primarily as a set of institutional
arrangements concerned with preparing the future labor force, which includes
developing both skills and work discipline. That orientation reinforces the
inclination to link schooling with projected labor needs, to emphasize
acquiring information, to regard teachers as transmitters and students as
receivers of knowledge, and to rely heavily on examinations and other selection
and exclusion mechanisms. The commonly asserted view that young Africans must
be prepared for their roles in the global economy, that is that their jobs and
the skills those jobs require are likely to be defined not within the country
but at distant centers of economic and political power, bolsters the external
orientation of this instrumental view of education. Schools, it is argued, need
to prepare the workers who will, say, assemble automobiles as well and more
efficiently than automobile workers elsewhere.
Legitimacy, however, is rooted in popular
participation and consent. Maintaining the legitimacy not only of particular
office holders but of governing arrangements more generally requires the active
involvement of an informed public aware that it wields power and willing to use
it. From this perspective, education must be concerned with, and must be seen
to be concerned with, encouraging participation, redressing inequality,
promoting social mobility, and fostering cooperation and non‑violent
conflict resolution. This orientation reinforces the inclination to regard
learners as active initiators, not passive recipients. As well, opening new
schools throughout the country has been one of the clearest and most tangible
manifestations of the provision of services to the populace.28
In short, as it struggles with its own fragility,
the state adopts two different, at times incompatible, postures toward the
education system. Most often its orientation is functional and technical.
Periodically, however, its expectations for schools are more liberal and
humanist. The appropriate institutional configurations, even spatial arrangements,
for these two orientations also differ. The school‑as‑factory
architecture so common throughout the world, classrooms with the teacher‑authority
at the front, separated by buffering space from students in orderly rows, and
hierarchical administrations within schools and school systems all reflect the
instrumental role of schooling. Open classrooms, activity group seating
patterns, and shared leadership responsibilities generally reflect a preference
for the liberal and humanist perspective.
Note that I have pointed here to two related but
distinct tensions. One is confronted in the political system as the state works
to promote both accumulation and economic growth and at the same time to
establish and reinforce its legitimacy. The second is confronted in the
education system, which is charged both with preparing students for the world
of work and at the same time with nurturing the development of individual
potential, intellectual critique, and societal well‑being. Each with its
own characteristics, participants, institutional configurations, and
consequences, these two tensions are interdependent but not identical. While
they intersect frequently and are often mutually reinforcing, neither fully
determines the other.
Understood somewhat more broadly, education in
Africa has a dual charter. Its major task is the reproduction of the economic,
political, and social order. 29 For that, schools assume responsibility for
developing requisite skills (train. ing). That in turn is generally assumed to
require that students be assigned to ability groups (tracking). Schools then
become the mechanism by which society selects which young people will proceed
far in their education and which will not and certifying the accomplishments of
those who succeed. Especially important at this juncture is the intemalization
of the reasonableness of that certification. For schools to serve their
reproductive role, students who fail must attribute their problems to their own
lack of skill or application, or to circumstances beyond their control, or
perhaps to bad luck. What the schools must avoid is the understanding that
tracking, achievement, and certification, and their consequences for subsequent
life chances, are planned and controllable outcomes of schools and schooling.
(Consider for a moment teachers whose students all receive high marks. The
immediate assumption is that the teacher must be doing something wrong, since
the classes of teachers who behave appropriately have both successes and
failures.) Schools must legitimize as well as track, select, and certify. Their
assessments must be accepted as just and appropriate and internalized. Where
there is significant unemployment and underemployment, lengthening the course
of study, ostensibly to enable graduates to be better prepared and thus more
employable, delays their entry into the work force. When they do not secure the
jobs they seek, that emphasis on schooling as job preparation also functions to
direct their frustrations away from the economic and political system that has
not created sufficient jobs and toward the education system that has apparently
failed to prepare them adequately.
Reproducing the social order in a capitalist world
system, however, also requires critique and innovation. To survive in a fiercely
competitive environment, national economies must have some people who reject
the old ways of doing things, who insist on looking for better alternatives,
who are willing to take the risks to criticize and innovate. Hence, schools
have a radical as well as a conservative role. They must enable and encourage
at least some students to ask difficult questions, to be impatient with the
answers they receive, to trust their own judgment at least as much as their
teachers' opinions.
The education system is thus charged with
contradictory tasks in reproducing society: preserving and protecting the major
features of the social order and at the same time challenging and changing
them.' Commonly, education systems try to manage that combination by separation‑‑emphasizing
the conservative role in most schools for most students and encouraging
critique in a few schools, generally for elite students. In practice, that
separation is difficult to establish and maintain. Each orientation is
corrosive of the other. Critique and innovation have a momentum of their own.
Schools become sites for rebellion, indirect (withdrawal, rejection) and direct
(militant organization).
During the more recent nationalist and liberation
struggles, militants emphasized education's critical role. As minority rule was
dismantled and the new order emerged, nearly everywhere in Africa education has
turned back to its conservative charter, more concerned with preserving order
than with challenging common understandings and forging new paths. In the circumstances
of the peripheral conditioned state and dependent legitimation, accumulation is
deemed more important than redistribution.
Privatization
What, then, of the strong push for privatization?
Historically, education in Africa has been understood primarily as a public
responsibility. In recent years, private education institutions have
proliferated at all levels, both with and without government encouragement. The
arguments for this transition toward an expanded role for private education are
several. The most compelling is that they can expand access, since even with
the most optimistic assumptions, government education systems cannot meet the
demand for education in most African countries. Since they are likely to be
better funded, private schools can also improve the quality of education, it is
argued, and in doing so challenge public schools to improve their quality.
Explicitly or implicitly, it is often assumed that private schools will be more
efficiently managed than their public counterparts and that they will achieve
comparable or better results at lower unit costs.
Historically, private schools have functioned to
reinforce and protect inequality within Africa, usually in racial terms but
more recently in terms of socioeconomic status. More affluent families can send
their children to schools with higher fees and thereby increase the likelihood
that their children will succeed them in higher level and better paid posts.
Not surprisingly, reactions to the pressure for privatization are mixed.
On this, the data are muddy. One confusion is that
the category "private school" is often applied both to entre.
preneurial, for‑profit schools and to schools established and managed by
churches, other community or non‑governmental organizations, or even district
or local government. A second is that countries and organizations use different
definitions of "private." As well, while in some African countries
private schools do seem to provide stronger academic programs, in other
countries it is the government schools that are the most highly regarded. Since
the categories obscure important differences in schools and in their impacts on
their societies, the aggregate data on this issue are problematic. The
percentage of learners in private schools seems to have declined in precisely
the era of very strong pressure to privatize. In 1970, private schools enrolled
21.9% of Africa's primary school students, but by 1990 only 7.3%. At the
secondary level, the percentage of all students enrolled in private schools declined
from 25.3% in 1970 to 12.2% in 1990.3 'At the same time, scattered case study
evidence suggests that significant additional private instruction, often in the
form of special fee‑based lessons offered by school teachers, is
widespread in many countries.
Combined, those observations suggest that
privatization may have had a particularly perverse effect in Africa. On the one
hand, perhaps with a few exceptions it may not have generated the additional
education revenue and expanded access widely expected to result from
encouraging the proliferation of non‑governmental schools. On the other,
privatization may have reinforced the disparities within education and
inequality in society more generally.
Decentralization
The widespread sense of crisis in education in
Africa combined with the perceived failure of central institutions has fueled a
fascination with decentralization. 32 A late 1980s World Bank report on
education exemplifies the widespread optimism by declaring
"decentralization ... the key that unlocks the potential of schools to
improve the quality of education. "33 The rationales for decentralization
are multiple. Greater local autonomy is deemed inherently desirable on human,
societal, and intellectual grounds, emphasizing the development of human
potential and the intrinsic‑as contrasted with instrumental‑value
of democracy and thus citizen participation in governance The devolution of
authority is deemed essential to maintaining and expanding political power or
control, or, from the opposite perspective, for challenging and reforming the
political system. Decentralization can permit expanded access to decision
making arenas. Decentralization is also expected to lead to improved decision
making, reduced bureaucracy, and better administration.
Experiences with decentralization in education have
been mixed, often disappointing." Expected benefits, have proved illusory.
In part, the rhetoric of decentralization has not in practice been accompanied
by real transfer of authority. In part, regarding decentralization primarily as
a strategy for improving administration and implementation has itself been self‑limiting.
Decentralization is inherently a political process concerned with specifying
who rules in broader or narrower settings. Indeed, there is no absolute value
in either central direction or local autonomy. Both are more or less important
at different moments. Both must coexist. Notwithstanding the common assertion
that decentralization empowers citizens, especially disadvantaged groups, in
their relationship to large, bureaucratic, and distant government, neither
centralization nor decentralization necessarily benefits the disadvantaged.
Where privilege is maintained by strong central authority, increased local
autonomy may create room for some groups to transform their circumstances.
Where inequality is maintained by local authorities, however, disadvantaged
groups may seek intervention by the national government to constrain the action
of local institutions. Hence, it is not surprising that ostensibly similar
institutional arrangements can serve very different goals and move in very
different directions.
Indeed, decentralization can have very perverse
consequences. To the extent that decentralization strengthens local interests
and their institutions, it obstructs redistribution. Parents may be willing to
pay more for their children's education. But except in unusual circumstances
they are generally reluctant to see their increased school fees used to improve
the schooling of others' children elsewhere. As recent experiences in South
Africa have shown, local control thus permits advantaged communities to
entrench their privilege and resist change.
South Africa
Until recently, South Africa's experiences were
generally excluded from discussions of education in Africa. The extremism of
apartheid and South African politics more generally were reflected in the
extremism of its education. Though extreme, South Africa was perhaps never as
unique as was commonly thought. The use of education to structure economic,
political, and social roles‑in South Africa, to segregate and subordinate‑is
common throughout the world. Central to the maintenance of minority rule and
organizing and managing a sharply differentiated society, education was at the
same time also an escape valve for a selected elite. Education has as well been
a sharply contested terrain, manifested repeatedly in South Africa, including
students' uprising in Soweto in 1976. Indeed, several of the themes addressed
here are as relevant to South Africa as they are to other settings. The delayed
and very dramatic transition to majority rule in South Africa combines with its
more developed productive capacity and infrastructure, and therefore available
national and individual wealth, to extend and entrench South Africa's influence
across the continent. Let us note briefly several of the major currents in
South African education.35
Like colonial education elsewhere in Africa,
education in apartheid South Africa sought explicitly to structure roles and
relationships in society. Especially as the education philosophy was elaborated
and articulated by the National Party government that came to power in 1948,
most Africans were to receive little education, if any at all, focused on the
basic literacy, numeracy, and other skills deemed necessary for the labor force
in the country's industrializing economy. Educators were cautioned to avoid
raising students' expectations that education would lead to "greener
pastures." At the same time, a small segment of each subordinate group was
to have access to more advanced education, to provide the administrative staff,
the teachers, the nurses, even a few doctors and lawyers, that the system
required. Hence, a few Africans were admitted to elite schools, generally
church or other private institutions. As elsewhere in Africa, then, from that
elite came both the lower level officials and administrators of minority rule
and the activist leaders who militantly opposed it.
Where education is primarily concerned with
structuring roles, it is the experience of schooling that matters, not
learning. As the critics of apartheid education highlighted its shortcomings,
they sought also to shift its emphasis from schooling to learning. That
distinction was posed especially sharply in the debates on strategies for
addressing the education of older and younger adults who had never been to
school or whose schooling had been truncated by apartheid and the anti‑apartheid
struggle. In the midst of repression and challenge, a wide range of community
groups developed programs intended to enable adults to continue their education
in diverse non‑school settings. As the antiapartheid struggle
intensified, education also became a mobilization strategy, concerned with
raising political consciousness and enabling disadvantaged groups to seize the
initiative and reclaim their rights as citizens. In this domain, too, South
African experiences paralleled those in other countries. During their
struggles, for example, Zimbabwe's, Mozam‑ bique's, and Namibia's liberation
movements recognized the importance of education as mobilization and
politicization. Schools in war zones were mobile community centers concerned
with confronting not only the military power of their opponents but also the
internalization of subordination within the African population. In the initial
years of majority rule, however, the emphasis has perceptibly shifted from
learning and mobilization to schooling. Schools are the markers of modernity.
Formerly shut, schools are the entry gates to desired futures, the fruits of
the defeat of the old order. With a long history of attention to examinations
and certification, the education system and its officials are more comfortable
dealing with schooling than with learning. The widely heralded efforts to
restore the culture of learning have in practice had more to do with
reestablishing the discipline of schooling than with nurturing and harnessing
curiosity and the intrinsic rewards of the learning process. Like other African
countries in an earlier era, South Africa has apparently moved from education
as politics to education as administration.
In part, the marginalization of political
initiatives for education reflects a shifting center of gravity in political
leadership specific to South Africa's setting. Primarily concerned with the
education of exiles, earlier the African National Congress education department
did not play a strong role in the formulation of post‑apartheid education
policy. Student uprisings in the mid 1970s and protests and boycotts continuing
into the 1980s seized the initiative in education away from the apartheid
state. But critical as these were, they were unable to set and lead a new
agenda for transforming education. With the formation of the National Education
Co‑ordinating (formerly Crisis) Committee (NECC) in 1985, a student‑teacher‑parent
anti‑apartheid education alliance with strong community roots, this
protest became focused, coordinated and directed at the establishment of an
alternative, democratic, critical, empowering, non‑racist, and non‑sexist
education. Unbanned early in 1990s, the ANC eventually eclipsed and
marginalized the NECC. As it did so, the ANC both reflected and led the
transition from the focus on opposition and then policy to an overarching
concern with planning. Relatively rapidly, the ANC education department itself
ceased to play the active leadership role, deferring to decision makers and
planners, primarily those within the reorganized Department of Education.
Following the majority rule election, the new
education leadership did not assume the mantle of radical and militant
educators. Whereas the period before the majority rule election was marked by
the energy, dynamism, populism, and urgency of the education democratic
movement, the immediate post‑election period was remarkable for its
uncertainty and the absence of a visible, energetic, and purposive leadership.
That became even more consequential as South Africa struggled to decentralize
responsibility for education, a constitutional compromise forged to secure
broad participation in the majority rule election. That is, notwithstanding the
earlier expectation that the multiple, racially differentiated education
authorities would be integrated into a strong national ministry, all but higher
education became the responsibility of the nine new provinces. Since only a few
of those provinces had the infrastructure, staff, and experience to manage an
education system and since no one had experience with decentralized education
authority, the initial consequence of this extensive decentralization was to
blunt still further the radical education initiative. As people scrambled to
implement the new pattern, it became clear that decentralization has provided
an extended lease on life for the old education authorities and offered to
advantaged communities a new framework for preserving privilege.
At the same time, the inherited inequalities
combined with the commitment to national reconciliation, in part manifested in
a post‑apartheid government of national unity, to generate a financial
crisis for education in a relatively affluent country. The general agreement
was to expand access without reducing quality, understood to mean maintaining
spending in elite schools and affluent communities. The recognition that there
were limited available resources for a reform agenda fueled an inclination‑as
in the rest of Africa‑to seek external funds. With those funds came ideas
about what is desirable and appropriate for the country's post‑apartheid
education agenda and how to achieve it.
Education
had been at the center of the anti‑apartheid struggle. Its task, everyone
agreed, was social transformation. As the new government assumed power,
responding to both general and specific pressures, it moved from mobilization
to planning to implementation. As elsewhere in Africa, its principal concerns
were expanded access, desegregation‑ and the redress of inequality. In
the context of a constitutionally required fundamental decentralization,
education debates were less focused on learning and liberation increasingly
concerned with schooling and examinations and more generally with education as
preparation for the world of work. Surprisingly quickly, education's
conservative charter was once again becoming paramount.
From Education as Social Transformation to Education as (and for)
Production
Let us take stock. African countries came to their
independence with high aspirations and expectations. For capitalists and
socialists alike, education held the promise of national development, community
improvement, and individual social mobility. Nearly everywhere schools
mushroomed and enrollments increased. Community centers, radio, television, and
village newspapers were employed in efforts to enable older learners to
participate in the march toward education for all.
In much of Africa, the rate of education expansion
could not be sustained. Facilitates deteriorated, worn out textbooks were not
replaced, libraries had few books, laboratories had little equipment, and gross
enrollment ratios stagnated or declined. Measures of education quality, of
school efficiency, and of teacher and learner satisfaction showed similar
distress. By the end of the Twentieth Century, spending per pupil in affluent
countries was 40‑60 times higher than comparable spending in most of
Africa. There continued to be imaginative experiments, but in general promising
innovations were localized and often did not survive the departure of their
founders.
As they confronted this education crisis whose
roots lay in poverty, the international division of labor, fragile dependent
states and deteriorating public service, African countries turned increasingly
to foreign funding. Innovation and reform, and in some countries even textbooks
and desks were assumed to require external support. With the foreign funding
came ideas and values, advice and directives on how education systems ought to
be managed and targeted. While the external resources amounted to a very small
portion of total spending on education, their direct and indirect influence on
policy and programs was often substantial. Notwithstanding a wide range of
approaches to setting education policy, their imprint on education agendas and
priorities is clearly visible across the continent. As external agencies
undertook research as well as providing funding and development advice, their
perspectives on scholarship and science shaped approaches, methodologies, and
the definition of universities' missions and more generally the scientific
enterprise. Throughout Africa, unable to find local support, education
researchers became contracted consultants. As they did so, those understandings
of research, from framing questions to gathering data to interpretive
strategies, were internalized and institutionalized, no longer foreign imports
but now the apparently unexceptional everyday routines of universities,
research institutes, and indeed informed discourse.
We see here international convergence at several
levels. Increasingly, the specification of education quality is presumed to be
universal rather than nationally or culturally or situationally specific. As
such, it is amenable to mea. surement through the sorts of standardized
assessments that seek to compare, say, reading ability among fourth grade
students in England, Korea, and Zimbabwe. Similarly, notions of effective
schools, of good school management, of community participation are also treated
as universals.
It is in a context of persisting poverty, aid
dependence, increasing debt, and powerful pressures from within and without to
adopt a particular understanding of development, that African governments have
been inclined to emphasize accumulation over legitimation. Similarly, though
pockets of innovation and radical reform persist, the trajectory of education
policy and practice in Africa has generally been to discard or devalue
education's role in economic and social transformation in favor of education's
role in maintaining particular patterns of economic, social, and political
organiza. tion. In practice, the productivist and conservative charter for
education contributes to entrenching still further the conditioned state and
Africa's dependence, and within Africa to acquiescing in, even seeing as
necessary fundamental societal inequalities and the politics they breed.
Consistent
with that conservative role for education, attention has increasingly focused
on efficiency, quality, and school improvement, often modeled on approaches and
experiences elsewhere. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of liberation and
empowerment, the commonly held view is that education must enable Africa to run
faster as it tries to catch up with those who are ahead rather than to forge
new paths or to transform the international economy and Africa's role in it.
Scrambling to catch up always leaves those presumed to be in front to determine
where they, and thus everyone else, are going.
Notes
1. An earlier
version of this paper appeared in Robert E Arnove and Carlos Alberto Torres,
editors, Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local
(Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999),
pp. 393‑431.
2. J. E Ade
Ajayi, Lameck K. H. Goma, and G. Ampah Johnson, The African Experience with Higher Education. Accra, London, and
Athens, OH: Association of African Universities, James Currey, and Ohio University
Press, 1996), p. 145.
3. As we shall
see, beyond the mystification and exoticism associated with the "dark
continent," the terminology commonly employed regularly structures the
discussion in ways that are not immediately apparent even to careful readers
and active partici‑ pants in policy debates. The specification of what is
"Africa" is an instructive case in point. Nearly all World Bank and
many other documents on Africa include a note that indicates "Most of the
discussion and all of the statistics about Africa in this study refer to just
thirty‑nine countries south of the Sahara, for which the terms Africa and
Sub‑Saharan Africa are used interchangeably" (this example is from
World Bank, Education in Sub‑Saharan Africa, viii; emphasis added). That
is, "Africa" is not the Africa specified either by geography‑countries
on the African continent and its adjacent islands‑or by African states
themselves‑‑membership in the Organization of African Unity‑but
rather a subset of those states grouped to reflect the foreign policy interests
and categories of the World Bank, the United States, and other countries of the
North Atlantic. Unfortunately, there is currently no straightforward resolution
to this dilemma. Much of the most readily available data on education in Africa
come from publications of those organizations, and to date apparently no one
has systematically revised those data to include North Africa or reorganized
other data that do include North Africa to make them directly comparable. In
this discussion, other than explicitly noted exceptions, my comments generally
refer to the entire continent.
4. World Bank.
Priorities and Strategies for Education (Washington: World Bank, 1995), 14.
5. For a fuller
discussion of these understandings of education, see Joel Samoff,
"Institutionalizing International Influence," in Robert E Arnove and
Carlos Alberto Torres, editors, Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local (Boulder:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 51‑89.
6. 1 have
addressed this problem in more detail in "The Facade of Precision in
Education Data and Statistics: A Troubling Example from Tanzania," Joumal of Modem African Studies 29, 4 (December
1991): 669‑689.
7. The country
is Tanzania. UNESCO, United Republic of
Tanzania: Education in Tanzania. Volume I, Overview (Paris: March, 1989),
p. 15.
8. UNESCO, World
Education Report 1998, Regional tables 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 (the categories are those
defined by UNESCO).
9. Inter‑Agency
Commission, World Conference on Education for All (UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, World
Bank). Final Report. World Conference
on Education for All: Meeting Basic Learning
Needs. New York: UNICEF, 1990.
10.
Unfortunately, there have been few systematic studies of aid to African
education and especially of its volume and its impact on the direction of
capital flows. For South Africa in 1993, foreign aid was estimated to account
for less than 1.5% of total spending on education. See Baudouin Duvieusart and
Joel Samoff, Donor Cooperation and Coordination in Education in South Africa (Paris: UNESCO, Division
for Policy and Sector Analysis, 1994).
11. World Bank,
Priorities and Strategies for Education, 113.
12. UNESCO,
World Education Report 1998, Table 4. The broad age range of enrolled students
permits figures greater than 100%.
13. UNESCO,
World Education Report 1998, Tables 6 and 8.
14. Adhiambo
Odaga and Ward Heneveld, Girls and Schools in Sub‑Saharan Africa: From Analysis to Action (Washington:
World Bank, 1995), 14.
15. See Joel
Samoff, with N'Dri Therese Assie‑Lumumba, Analyses, Agendas, and
Priorities in African Education: A Review
of Externally Initiated, Commissioned, and Supported Studies of Education in Africa, 1990‑1994 (Paris: UNESCO,
1996).
16. Immanuel
Wallerstein, "The Rise and Future Demise of World‑Systems Analysis,"
Review XXI, 1 (1998):107.
17. Severine M.
Rugumamu, Globalization, Liberalization and Africa's Marginalization. Harare:
African Association of Political Science, Occasional Paper Series v3, nl, 1999,
p. 5.
18. The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South Commission (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990),
pp. 277‑278, quoted in UNESCO, World Education Report 1993, p. 17.
19. 1 draw here
on discussions of education and relevance in two major Namibian policy
statements, Toward Education for All (Windhoek: Minis" of Education and
Culture, 1993), and Investing in People, Developing a Country: Higher Education
for Development in Namibia (Windhoek: Ministry of Higher Education, Vocational
Training, Science and Technology, 1998).
20. Julius K.
Nyerere, Education for Self‑Reliance (Dar es Salaam: TANU, 1967);
reprinted in Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism / Uhuru na Ujamaa (Dar es
Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968), 267‑290.
21. Ingemar
Gustafsson, Integration Between Education
and Work at Primary and Post‑Primary Level‑the Case of Botswana (Stockholm: University of
Stockholm, Institute of International Education, Working Paper Series No. 95,
1985). For a parallel effort in Zimbabwe, see Ingemar Gustafsson, Zimbabwe
Foundation for Education with Production. ZIMFEP A Follow‑Up Study
(Stockholm: Swedish International Development Authority, SIDA Education
Division Documents, No. 29,1985).
22. Two recent collections of case studies address
education policy making in Africa: David R. Evans, editor, Education Policy
Formation in Africa: A Comparative Study of
Five Countries (Washington; USAID, Bureau for Africa, Office of Analysis,
Research, and Technical Support, Technical Paper No. 12, 1994), and Association
for the Development of African Education, Formulating Education Policy Lessons
and Experiences from sub‑Saharan Africa (Paris: Association for
the Development of African Education, 1996). 1 draw here as well on Joel
Samoff, "Education Policy Formation in Tanzania: Self‑Reliance and
Dependence," in David R. Evans,
editor, Education Policy Formation in Africa: A Comparative Study of Five
Countries (Washington: U.S. Agency for International Development, 1994), 85‑126
23. Joel Samoff,
with Suleman Sumra, "From Planning to Marketing: Making Education and
Training Policy in Tanzania," in Joel Samoff, editor, Coping With Crisis:
Austerity, Adjustment, and Human Resources (London: Cassell, 1994), 134,172.
24. Since an
extended discussion of the state in Africa is far beyond the scope of this
paper, I limit my attention here to the tension between accumulation and
legitimation and its implications for education. For a more extended
development of these and related themes, see Martin Carnoy and Joel Samoff,
Education and Social Transition in the
Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially Part
1, and Martin Carnoy, "Education and the State: From Adam Smith to
Perestroika," in Emergent Issues in Education: Comparative Perspectives.
Robert F Arnove, Philip G. Altbach, and Gail R Kelly, eds. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1992, 143‑159.
25. Martin
Carnoy, "Education and the Transition State," in Martin Carnoy and
Joel Samoff, Education and Social Transition in the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, 63‑96.
26. Frantz
Fanon, "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963).
27. The World
Bank and other external agencies have recently focused major attention on
problems of governance and administration, though generally without addressing
the structural roots of managerial inefficiency and the lack of transparency
and accountability~ For example, see Mamadou Dia, A Governance Approach to
Civil Service Reform in Sub‑Saharan Africa (Washington: World Bank
Technical Paper Number 225, Africa Technical Department Series, 1993), and
World Bank, Sub‑Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth
(Washington: World Bank, 1989).
28. Hans Weiler
explores what he terms "compensatory legitimation" in "Education
and Power: The Politics of Educational Decentralization in Comparative
Perspective," Educational Policy 3, 1 (1989): 31‑43.
29. Samuel
Bowles and Herbert Gintis have developed and refined the notion of the
correspondence between school and society. See "Education as a Site of
Contradictions in the Reproduction of the Capital‑Labor Relationship:
Second Thoughts on the 'Correspondence Principle,'" Economic and
Industrial Democracy 2 (1981): 223‑242.
30. Carnoy and
Levin characterize this tension as between education as a democratizing force
(social mobility public education as an equalizing experience, instruction on
the democratic ideal) and education as a mechanism for reproducing capitalist
inequalities (class, race, or gender division of labor, unequal access to knowledge):
Martin Carnoy and Henry M. Levin, Schooling
and Work in the Democratic State
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).
31. The 1970‑1983
data are from the World Bank, Education in Sub‑Saharan Africa, Table A‑13
(weighted means); the 1985‑1990 data are from the World Bank, African
Development Indicators 1994‑1995, Table 13‑16.
32. The
literature has mushroomed. For an overview of major issues, see Joel Samoff,
"Centralization: The Politics of Interventionism," Development and Change 21, 3(July 1990):513‑530.
33. Marlaine
Lockheed, et al., The Quality of Primary Education in Developing Countries (Washington: World
Bank, 1989), 1.
34. For an
overview or problems drawn from Latin America, see Juan Prawda, Educational
Decentralization in Latin America: Lessons Learned (Washington: World Bank,
Human Resources Division, Technical Department, Latin America and the Caribbean
Region, 1992).
35. Among recent sources on education in South Africa, see M Cross, and Z. Mkwanazi Twala, editors, Unity, Diversity and Reconciliation: A Debate On the Politics of Curriculum in South Africa. (Cape Town: Juta, 1998); G. Gisher, "Policy, Governance and the Reconstruction of Higher Education in South Africa," Higher Education Policy 22, 2‑3 (July 1998): 121‑140; Clive Harber, "Markets, Equity and Democracy‑Structural Adjustment and the Tensions of Educational Change in South Africa," International Journal of Educational Development 18, 3 (May 1998): 247‑254; Jonathan Jansen, "'Essential Alterations'? A Critical Analysis of the State's Syllabus," Perspectives in Education 17, 2 (July 1998): 1‑11; Peter Kallaway, Glenda Kruss, Aslarn