The influence of Philip Foster on the World Bank

Abstract

At a conference on education in Addis Ababa in 1961 countries from all over the world gathered to assess their ambitions for education. Without exception, each brought a report justifying their plans in accordance with a manpower forecast. It did not matter whether they were socialist or capitalist, newly independent or of long standing independence; it did not matter whether they were Asian, African or European. Manpower plans had a monopoly, being the accepted technique to respond to the question: Should the public invest more in education and how can it know if the investment will be productive? For the 18 years from the time of its first loan in 1962‐1980, the World Bank justified every education lending operation through the use of manpower forecasting (Heyneman 2003). Among the consequences of this analytic monopoly was the restriction of all lending to specific skill instruction and to vocational and engineering schools. Primary and secondary schools were occasionally allowed to benefit from a loan, but only if they could be justified by adding workshops, handicraft centres and other ‘‘practical’’ facilities. Academic skills were described as being ‘‘impractical.’’ They were thought to lead students astray, to encourage them to migrate to the cities and to be disgruntled when they did not find work or work appropriate to their expectations, which were assumed to be unrealistic. There were two problems with this. The first was that the bias introduced by manpower forecasting meant that important areas of the education sector had to be ignored (Heyneman 1986a). During this period the Bank could lend for the improvement of universities but only in the faculties of engineering. Regardless of the demand from the country, internal rules meant that the Bank could not assist general libraries, the liberal arts, the humanities, general science, primary or secondary education, preschool education, education research or statistics (Heyneman 1987). None of these areas could be justified with a manpower plan and hence they were forbidden. The second problem concerned the demand for new kinds of lending. Vocational and technical education was a small part of the education sector and under President