Can Education be Used as a Tool to Build a Socialist Society in Africa? The Tanzanian Case

Abstract

By the time most African countries achieved independence in the early 1960s, education had become a sacred cow for both the governments and the people. For the former, education represented a major tool for nation-building and development which, in those days, meant essentially rapid industrialisation; for the latter, education–especially at the post-primary levels–was the main vehicle for social mobility, primarily because it made possible the acquisition of a well-paid job in the modern sector. For a few years it looked as if there was no contradiction between the aspirations of the people and the goals of the governments, on the one hand, and the socio-economic realities, on the other. Soon the bubble burst, however: industrialisation turned out to be no panacea; the limits of Africanisation were rapidly reached in the civil service, but proved to be a protracted affair in the economy. As the ugly scourge of youth unemployment started to spread in Africa by the mid-1960s, attention was focused on educational systems which began to be perceived as ‘dysfunctional’–i.e. as incompatible with the social and economic realities which were largely agricultural and rural. But more ominously, schools came also under attack as serving mainly the interests of the emerging bourgeoisies.