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Education and Social Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

Few would disagree with the observation that the schools and universities of sub-Saharan Africa are perhaps the most important contemporary mechanisms of stratification and redistribution on the continent. They are not simply reflections of extant patterns of social and economic differentiation, but rather powerful independent forces in the creation of new and emergent groupings based on the variable possession of power, wealth, and prestige. Moreover, in using the word ‘contemporary’ we should not overlook the fact that formal educational systems are not a recent phenomenon in Africa. Schools existed on the western littoral in the eighteenth century, and their development in many parts of Africa, though slow up to the beginning of World War II, was of great significance. However, the African ‘educational explosion’ is largely a post-war phenomenon, and as a result we can no longer regard the school as an alien and intrusive institution perched precariously atop a range of predominantly ‘traditional’ societies. In most parts of Africa, the school is now as familiar a part of the local scene as the corrugated iron roof. Virtually everywhere, a whole generation would think it inconceivable to be without schools and, what is more, though Africa still remains the least formally educated of the continents, almost everyone now has a lively sense of the individual benefits that education can bring. As in other areas of social life, Africans perceive schooling in shrewd, pragmatic, and instrumental terms.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

page 202 note 1 The absence of any specific reference to women in this review of the literature is deliberate since the topic is significant enough to merit a separate article.

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page 214 note 1 For an exchange on this issue, see Hurd, C. E. and Johnson, T. J., ‘Education and Social Mobility in Ghana’, in Sociology of Education, 40, 1, Winter 1967, pp. 5579Google Scholar and Philip Foster, ‘Comments on Hurd and Johnson’, in ibid. 41, I, Winter 1968, pp. 111–15.

page 215 note 1 Weis, loc. cit.

page 215 note 2 Jahoda, loc. cit.

page 215 note 3 Peil, ‘Ghanaian University Students’.

page 215 note 4 van den Berghe, ‘Some Characteristics of University of Ibadan Students’.

page 215 note 5 Goldthorpe, op. cit.

page 215 note 6 van den Berghe, ‘An African Elite Revisited’.

page 215 note 7 Currie, Op. Cit.

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page 217 note 1 The exams may be fairly administered, but this is not to say that they are efficient or equitable. For commentaries, see Irvine, S. H., ‘Selection for Secondary Schools in Southern Rhodesia’, University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Salisbury, Occasional Paper No. 4, 1965Google Scholar; also Somerset, H. C. A., Predicting Success in the School Certificate (Nairobi, 1968)Google Scholar, and ‘Who Goes to Secondary School? Relevance, Reliability and Equity in Secondary School Selection’, in Court and Ghai (eds.), op. cit. pp. 149–84.

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page 219 note 3 Indeed, there is some evidence to support this hypothesis. At least three studies have shown that the less an ethnic group is proportionately represented in the educational system, the more atypical of that group as a whole is the student sample: Foster and Clignet, The Fortunate Few, Lloyd, P. C., Power and Independence, p. 107Google Scholar, and Beckett and O'Connell, op. cit.

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page 221 note 3 I have recently come across an independent confirmation of this thesis. In his psychological studies in Rhodesia, S. H. Irvine found that the greatest influence on the achievement scores of African secondary-school students was the quality of the institution attended, and then predicted that the effect on performance would decrease and the relation of test scores to environmental social factors would increase – i.e. African Societies would more closely resemble their western counterparts. See ‘Towards a Rationale for Testing Attainments and Abilities in Africa’, in British Journal of Educational Psychology (Edinburgh), XXXVI, 1, 02 1966, pp. 2432Google Scholar, and ‘A Five-Year Follow-Up of Secondary School Selection Procedures in Central Africa, 1962–1967’, in ibid. XXXVIII, 2, June 1968, pp. 208–11.

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page 225 note 2 See McQueen, ‘Unemployment and Future Orientations of Nigerian School-Leavers’.

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page 228 note 2 Knight, J. B., ‘The Determination of Wages and Salaries in Uganda’, in Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics, XXIX, 3, 08 1967, pp. 233–64Google Scholar, and ‘Earnings, Employment, Education and Income Distribution in Uganda’, in ibid. XXX, 4, November 1968, pp. 267–97.

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page 230 note 2 Foster, , Education and Social Change in Ghana, p. 248Google Scholar.

page 230 note 3 M. Hultin and J. P. Jallade, using baseline data that resembled the African situation, calculated that to increase primary enrolments from 50 to 90 per cent, secondary from 10 to 27 per cent, and university from 2 to 4·9 per cent over a decade, would raise aggregate capital and recurrent educational costs to 15 per cent of G.N.P. and 62 per cent of public revenues; ‘Costing and Financing Education in the LDCs: current issues’, Washington, World Bank Staff Working Paper No. 216, 1975.

page 231 note 1 See Fagbulu, A. M., ‘Private Proprietorship of School in Western Nigeria’, in Africa Today (Denver), 14, 1967, pp. 25–7Google Scholar; J. J. Lukenge, ‘Who Goes to Private Schools in Uganda: patterns of social recruitment to a second chance academic alternative’, Kampala, n.d. As regards Ghana, A. Mensah et al. op. cit. have shown that ‘special school’ students gain secondary-school places far out of proportion to their representation in the primary system.

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page 231 note 3 Price, Robert M., ‘The Pattern of Ethnicity in Ghana: a research note’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, XI, 3, 09 1973, pp. 470–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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page 233 note 2 Currie, op. cit. pp. 222–79.

page 234 note 1 For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Windham, D. M., ‘The Macro-Planning of Education: why it fails, why it survives, and the alternatives’, in Comparative Education Review (Los Angeles), XIX, 2, 06 1975, pp. 187201Google Scholar.

page 234 note 2 Foster, P., ‘Dilemmas of Educational Development: what we might learn from the past’, in Brammal, J. and May, R. J. (eds.), Education in Melanesia (Canberra, 1975), pp. 1538Google Scholar, and Comparative Education Review, XIX, 3, October 1975, pp. 375–92.

page 234 note 3 A summary of existing research on private and social rates of return to schooling shows that these are almost uniformly higher at the primary than at the secondary or tertiary levels in most less-developed nations. Cf. Psacharopoulos, G., Returns of Education (San Francisco, 1973)Google Scholar.

page 235 note 1 It should be remembered that there are affluent minorities in less-developed and poorer majorities in more-developed regions. There is always the danger that special subventions to the former will be disproportionately utilised by the affluent minority. This raises the general principle that where aid is to be given it should be, as far as possible, directed at individuals rather than collectivities. The tendency to base social policy on aggregates, be they ethnic or regional groups, always raises the question that subventions will find their way into the ‘wrong hands’.