Education And Development In Colonial And Postcolonial Africa

This open access edited volume offers an analysis of the entangled histories of education and development in twentieth-century Africa. It deals with the plurality of actors that competed and collaborated to formulate educational and developmental paradigms and projects: debating their utility and purpose, pondering their necessity and risk, and evaluating their intended and unintended consequences in colonial and postcolonial moments. Since the late nineteenth century, the “educability” of the native was the subject of several debates and experiments: numerous voices, arguments, and agendas emerged, involving multiple institutions and experts, governmental and non-governmental, religious and laic, operating from the corridors of international organizations to the towns and rural villages of Africa. This plurality of expressions of political, social, cultural, and economic imagination of education and development is at the core of this collective work.

This open access edited volume offers an analysis of the entangled histories of education and development in twentieth-century Africa. It deals with the plurality of actors that competed and collaborated to formulate educational and developmental paradigms and projects: debating their utility and purpose, pondering their necessity and risk, and evaluating their intended and unintended consequences in colonial and postcolonial moments. Since the late nineteenth century, the "educability" of the native was the subject of several debates and experiments: numerous voices, arguments, and agendas emerged, involving multiple institutions and experts, governmental and non-governmental, religious and laic, operating from the corridors of international organizations to the towns and rural villages of Africa. This plurality of expressions of political, social, cultural, and economic imagination of education and development is at the core of this collective work. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Education, development and decolonization provides a historical, theoretical and practical inter-disciplinary analysis of the contemporary trajectory of colonization (including internal colonization) through the linked projects of eurocentric development, globalization and the uncritical adoption of colonial modes of education and learning in schools, communities, social movements and the “progressive” church in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

What have postcolonial Sub-Saharan African countries achieved in their education policies and programmes? How far have they contributed to successful attainment of the targeted 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on education? What were the constraints and barriers for developing an education system that appeals to the needs of the sub-region? Re-thinking Postcolonial Education in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century: Post-Millennium Development Goals is an attempt to demonstrate that Sub-Saharan Africa has the potential and capability to provide solutions to challenges facing its desire and ability to provide sustainable education to its people. To that end, the contributors are academics with an African vision attempting to come up with African home-grown perspectives to fill the gap created by the lapse of the MDGs as the guiding vision and framework for educational provision in Africa and beyond. The book seeks to articulate and address African issues from an informed as well as objective African perspective. The book is also intended to provide insights to scholars who are interested in studying and understanding the nature of postcolonial education in the Sub-Saharan African region. Given the objectives and themes of this book, it is intended for academic scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, human rights scholars, curriculum developers, college and university academics, teachers, education policy makers, international organisations, and local and international non-governmental organisations that are interested in African education policies and programmes. “Rethinking Postcolonial Education in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century provides contemporary reflections from multiple perspectives and re-positions the issue of education at the forefront of the debates on African development.” – Lamine Diallo, Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada “The book is a welcome addition to discourses and analyses on education in sub-Saharan Africa with reference to a postcolonial critique and the Millennium Development Goals framework on education in Africa.” – Michael Tonderai Kariwo, PhD, Instructor and Research Fellow, University of Alberta, Canada

A collection of essays which critically examines education in the African context and presents possible courses of action to reinvent its future.