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Education and Social Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
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Few would disagree with the observation that the schools and universities of sub-Saharan Africa are perhaps the most important contemporary mechanisms of stratification and redistribution on the continent. They are not simply reflections of extant patterns of social and economic differentiation, but rather powerful independent forces in the creation of new and emergent groupings based on the variable possession of power, wealth, and prestige. Moreover, in using the word ‘contemporary’ we should not overlook the fact that formal educational systems are not a recent phenomenon in Africa. Schools existed on the western littoral in the eighteenth century, and their development in many parts of Africa, though slow up to the beginning of World War II, was of great significance. However, the African ‘educational explosion’ is largely a post-war phenomenon, and as a result we can no longer regard the school as an alien and intrusive institution perched precariously atop a range of predominantly ‘traditional’ societies. In most parts of Africa, the school is now as familiar a part of the local scene as the corrugated iron roof. Virtually everywhere, a whole generation would think it inconceivable to be without schools and, what is more, though Africa still remains the least formally educated of the continents, almost everyone now has a lively sense of the individual benefits that education can bring. As in other areas of social life, Africans perceive schooling in shrewd, pragmatic, and instrumental terms.
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References
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page 233 note 2 Currie, op. cit. pp. 222–79.
page 234 note 1 For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Windham, D. M., ‘The Macro-Planning of Education: why it fails, why it survives, and the alternatives’, in Comparative Education Review (Los Angeles), XIX, 2, 06 1975, pp. 187–201Google Scholar.
page 234 note 2 Foster, P., ‘Dilemmas of Educational Development: what we might learn from the past’, in Brammal, J. and May, R. J. (eds.), Education in Melanesia (Canberra, 1975), pp. 15–38Google Scholar, and Comparative Education Review, XIX, 3, October 1975, pp. 375–92.
page 234 note 3 A summary of existing research on private and social rates of return to schooling shows that these are almost uniformly higher at the primary than at the secondary or tertiary levels in most less-developed nations. Cf. Psacharopoulos, G., Returns of Education (San Francisco, 1973)Google Scholar.
page 235 note 1 It should be remembered that there are affluent minorities in less-developed and poorer majorities in more-developed regions. There is always the danger that special subventions to the former will be disproportionately utilised by the affluent minority. This raises the general principle that where aid is to be given it should be, as far as possible, directed at individuals rather than collectivities. The tendency to base social policy on aggregates, be they ethnic or regional groups, always raises the question that subventions will find their way into the ‘wrong hands’.
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