African policy linking education and development: Standard criticisms and a new departure

Abstract

Two generations of effort (from the 1920s to the 1960s) by pioneer African nationalists to use schools as the chief catalyst for national development strategy was followed by a generation of scholarship (from the 1960s to the 1980s) that was massively sceptical of their assumptions linking education, causally and positively, to development. The pioneers' writings and experiments, especially in southern Nigeria, are recounted in this paper's first section. The second section surveys the critical literature which experience, on the whole, justifies. The third and concluding section identifies a tangent of analysis which, it is argued, shifts the ground of the debate and supports more hopeful prospects for the current African generation's effort to link education and development productively. Evidence and comment are drawn principally from Anglophone West Africa, but there are inferences clearly to be drawn for general circumstances south of the Sahara.