Indigenous Adaptation: Uganda's Village Schools, ca. 1880–1937

Abstract

Millenium Development Goal 2, that both boys and girls will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling, has refocused attention on the challenge of both providing access to education for all African children and ensuring that the education provided has a meaningful and enduring impact on the lives of learners. In Uganda, the implementation of universal primary education (UPE) in 1997 and universal secondary education (USE) in 2005 have led educational policy makers, teachers, parents, and students to seek creative solutions to the problem of ensuring educational quality as schools incorporate 4 million more students. Some Ugandans worry about overcrowded classrooms and express concern that the children of the poor, who cannot escape into the private school system, will be disadvantaged in the end by the short-term decline in outcomes that UPE must inevitably entail. Others assert that only by tackling the challenge of universal primary education can the means be found to achieve it. As educators in Uganda search for strategies that will yield a high-quality education for all, it is instructive to look back to a time, early in the twentieth century, when Uganda had an educational system that provided rudimentary education to equal numbers of girls and boys, and large numbers of adults, but turned away from it. African history figures in comparative education scholarship primarily in inquiries into the promotion of the Tuskegee/Hampton model for African American education by the Phelps-Stokes Commissions, which toured West, South, and Central Africa in 1920 and East Africa in 1924. Under the chairmanship of Thomas Jesse Jones, an advocate of vocational education for Africans, the Commissions’ recommendations led to a turn away from literary education toward a focus on “adapted education.” Reviled by Africans as an attempt to hold them down and preserve European domination, “adapted education” sought to address the disconnect between the needs of predominantly agricultural communities and the literary character of most African schooling at that time (Davis 1976; Bude 1983). The role of missionaries as the primary promoters of education in colonized Africa and their “selective lending” of nineteenth-century school practices has also been explored (Yates 1984; Mackenzie 1993). This research has focused on the application of