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Education and Economic Development in Nigeria: The Need for a New Paradigm
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2014
Extract
The point has been made about the dangers inherent in attempts to analyze the underdeveloped world's problems purely in terms of the experiences or models of the industrialized, developed countries of the world. It is often warned that nations and cultures differ; and that what may have worked for one society may not necessarily work for another. Consequently, these critics caution against a blind transplantation of foreign tools or models to the distinctive conditions of the contemporary developing nations. Akeredolu-Ale (1972: 119-20) put it rather sharply in the Nigerian context:
… economic process cannot be studied in isolation but only in their social, political, and demographic setting…. Purely economic interpretations of the economic development process as it is going on in the less developed countries are bound to be incomplete. One striking feature of economic life in such countries, is the greater role which political factors (domestic and international) are playing in the determination of the process of economic evolution… Any investigation of the economic process in a contemporary underdeveloped country such as Nigeria, if it is to avoid superfidalism, must begin with an analytical framework that is much less restricted than that derived from orthodox Western economic theory. The transfer of Western theories, models and concepts to the study of economic problems… is not harmful per se, but it could be a source of great bias and distortion… when new facts require that they be seriously modified.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1977
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