Class Formation and Civil Society

The Politics of Education in Africa

Patrick M. Boyle

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138617674
• eBook ISBN: 9780429866999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1999, this study of the politics of education in Cameroon, the Congo and Kenya presents arresting empirical evidence that urban elites exiting public sector educational systems they have dominated in favour of private school networks of their own creation. Seeking to enhance their offspring's chances for survival and even domination in a world of scarce resources and limited opportunities for employment, elites see private schools as tools to shape newly emerging civil societies in Africa in their own image. From a theoretical perspective, the fresh evidence presented here shows that schooling has once again become a major social force influencing the balance of state and society in modern Africa. Re-examining an older political tradition of class analysis and integrating it into more recent civil society perspectives, the author shows that the abandonment of the unreliable education services of dysfunctional African states in favour of private schools has profound consequences for class articulation in societies dividing, once again, according to educational opportunities.

1 Introduction

In the cities of Sub-Saharan Africa, five-year old nursery school leavers sit for entrance exams and undergo formal interviews in the hope they will qualify for a place in the primary school of their choice. Those children not fortunate enough either to have attended a nursery school or, if they did attend, not to have attended a nursery school with a successful record of advancing its pupils, will probably have little opportunity to receive a primary education. Competition for places in primary schools in the 1990s has introduced African children at a very early age to a new and increasingly rigorous system of educational and social stratification.

Contemporary demographic and economic data suggest that rapid population growth and economic crisis now pose a serious and long-term threat to the educational opportunities of urban youth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Growth of school age populations in nearly every state in the region now outpaces growth of new educational facilities and strains the capacities of existing institutions to accommodate all those seeking schooling. Forecasts for the prospects for education in Africa at the outset of the new century concur insofar as they outline the daunting challenge of providing schools for the continent’s youngest inhabitants.

To say that those responsible for education in Africa face an uphill struggle in maintaining current educational infrastructure and creating new opportunities not only understates the magnitude of the problem, it neglects its complexity as well. How can states respond to the demands for education by burgeoning populations of urban youth when there are so many competing claims on limited public resources? What impact do current policy choices and educational practices have on the shape of educational opportunity for this generation and how will they affect those of the next generation, especially in a world in which the educational needs of the marketplace and workplace change so quickly? Finally, who benefits the most – and the least – from the changes taking place in education under these generally unfavorable conditions?

The topic of this study, the changing shape of formal education in Africa at the turn of the century, considers how the decline of state-supported (or public sector) education and the appearance of private sector education has altered the composition of emerging civil societies. Specifically, this book analyzes the evolution of education policy in three dynamic urban centers, Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – RDC (formerly Zaire), Yaoundé, Cameroon, and Nairobi, Kenya. Nearly 18 months of field research in these three African capital cities suggests to the author that the century in which modern education was introduced throughout the continent and then expanded with remarkable speed will end with an unusual paradox in the sphere of education. Public sector school systems created in the 1960s and blossoming in the 1970s now struggle to survive under the most severe kinds of pressures: little support from bankrupt states and meager support from impoverished citizens, most of whom are too poor to pay tuition. It is no exaggeration to advance the claim that opportunities for primary schooling are more seriously in jeopardy now than at any time since independence.

The principal empirical finding presented here is that the development of formal education has entered a new phase in Sub-Saharan Africa. This new phase has specific political implications insofar as schooling has an impact on the formation of social classes and helps shape the civil societies that are emerging throughout the region. Characterizing this new phase, the third in the development of formal education in Africa, are the efforts of urban elites to secure by their own means their educational advantages in a period of collapsing public educational services. They do so through the creation and maintenance of autonomous private schools. At a structural level, their efforts represent a major new political development. Urban elites have, through their creation of private networks of schools, begun to replace local governments and religious organizations as the principal actors for change in the formal education sector. They have thereby initiated a major shift in the way schools have been created and governed in the independence period. The appearance of this elite activity to provide schooling for its offspring is indicative of larger policy changes taking place in Africa and elsewhere, notably, the end of most welfare-state oriented public policies designed to supply social services for members of society. In a continent where the state’s sector of activity was relatively large, this change in the governance and operation of schools is but one indication of a new state-society balance.

With this new state-society balance has come a shift in social values as well. The emphasis the earlier policy orientation placed on equity in the provision of education had been seriously eroded by a dearth of public funds for schools. The inability of states to meet their obligations to maintain the sector has led to near universal and often strident calls for a return to “quality” in formal instruction. The decline of public sector education has had other consequences as well. The exit of wealthier segments of the population from public sector schools has continued the displacement of the social value of equity in the provision of education because only those with the means to pay for instruction offered in better institutions have been able to act upon the widely shared desire for quality in instruction. This is not to say that the emergence of a private sector of education has caused the decline of public sector school systems. Rather, the trend towards private education is a response within civil society to the lack of a basic social service. Thus far, however, that response has served the needs of only a small part of the population.

Positive assessments of the importance of formal education (or schooling) for economic development and poverty reduction in Africa underscores the lasting significance of these new elite actions in favor of private education in urban centers. Actually, this development and the decline of formal public sector education comes at an ironic juncture in the scholarly evaluation of the place of education in promoting development. For instance, after some years of ambivalence about the merits of funding projects for formal schooling at the primary level, the World Bank acknowledged in 1995 that education played a much more important role in economic development and poverty reduction than had previously been understood. It now claims to be the single largest source of external finance for education in low- and middle-income countries.¹ Indeed, research now supports the view that the main source of differences in standards of living among states is differences in human capital, largely the product of schooling. But at the top of the Bank’s list of problems in education is Africa and the disturbing decline of enrollments in primary education throughout the continent:

Particularly alarming are Africa’s falling primary enrollment ratios and, in some countries, falling absolute enrollments. Ratios have not fallen in all African countries. Of the thirty-five countries for which reasonably good data exist, gross primary ratios increased in twenty between 1980 and 1990. In fourteen others, however, including the most populous, the ratios fell, often by a large amount. Thus, the regional average ratio (calculated as the average of country ratios) unweighted by population, fell only from 79 to 78 percent. This may seem minor, but Africa was the only region in the world to register a declining ratio. Because many of the individual countries in which the ratio fell have large populations, the weighted regional average fell from 80 to 69 percent.²

Because of these declining enrollments, as many as 83 million African children between six and eleven years old in 2015 will not attend school.³

Singularly important for its impact on society is primary education, the level of schooling examined in the three case studies below. The rapid decline of this sector of formal instruction contrasts sharply with the many benefits widespread access to primary education has now been proven to offer in terms of economic development, poverty reduction, and support for good governance. In the first place, the public return on investment in education is higher in primary education than in secondary or higher education.⁴ Thus, public funding of primary education brings higher returns to society at lower costs than allocations to any other level. For example, at the beginning of the 1990s a year of primary education would cost about $900 throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, but a year of university education would cost at least two and a half times that sum. Moreover, states that reduce funding to primary education or shift funding to the higher levels also tend to exacerbate inequity in society because families of students at these higher levels have been shown to be more able to pay fees than families (who are the majority in Africa) trying to support primary education.⁵

Formal schooling also has a civic purpose. By facilitating the sharing of values throughout a society, formal schooling plays a role in preparing citizens for political participation. At a general level, adults in developing countries who have higher levels of educational attainment have more paid employment, higher individual earnings, greater agricultural productivity, lower fertility, better health and nutritional status and more “modern” attitudes than adults who have lower educational attainments.⁶ While comprehensive studies establishing a technical correlation between schooling and, say, democratization, are not available, literacy has been shown to offer critical support to democratic forms of government.⁷

If the exact relationship between education and democracy is less clear than one might like, most observers nonetheless find strong support for democracy in populations with high levels of education. In his studies of democracy Lipset concludes that “if we cannot say that a ‘high’ level of education is a sufficient condition for democracy, the available evidence suggests that it comes close to being a necessary one.”⁸ At the root of this claim is the belief that literate citizens place more demands on the political system, that is, they seek more influence over governmental decisions.

A set of normative beliefs which view primary education as an individual right usually accompany or underlay arguments in favor of primary education as a sound social, political, and economic investment. The stark practical reality in Africa today is that many states now and for the foreseeable future will lack the financial resources to support their existing school systems, much less expand them as quickly as their populations are expanding. A twenty-first century African scenario which portrays subordinate and marginalized illiterate urban populations governed over by the graduates of elite private academies raises the specter of society-wide unrest, on the one hand, or complacency and apathy, on the other, depending on one’s perspective of the response of urban populations to their exclusion from basic social services. The objective and subjective conditions under which these groups experience marginalization will lessen or increase the potential for social and political destabilization.⁹ Whatever the future, the stage is now set for a real bifurcation of African societies into a minority with varying levels of educational attainment and a majority with little or no school experience at all.

Thus, a pattern of elite domination of the educational sphere appears as an arresting but understandable political phenomenon in African education at the end of the century. This pattern need not foreshadow an inevitable future: states could once again take responsibly for devising relevant curricula, coordinate private, NGO, and voluntary association activity in education, and set standards for schools, both public and private. Based on their experience in the sector, privately organized groups within civil society could devise innovative mechanisms for the delivery of basic education throughout society – even under conditions of economic austerity and state decline. With minor exceptions, there is little evidence today of such creative alternatives. Whether or not such innovations eventually appear, the contemporary analysis of the politics of education in urban Africa needs first to identify and understand this pervasive set of dynamics leading to a wide gap between the educational opportunity of an elite minority and the educational exclusion of a growing majority.

The purpose of this book, an analysis of the political significance of the consolidation of elite dominance over formal education, includes, but is not limited to, the necessary and important task of documenting important empirical changes in formal education. Nevertheless, data gathering of basic facts about schools, their enrollments, locations, and personnel in these three cities has occupied much of the author’s efforts because so much scholarly literature in the education field has tended to focus narrowly on ideological debates over the merits of particular curricula instead of the much more politically volatile topics of numbers, locations, and financing of schools. Moreover, where enrollment statistics and estimates of government spending on education do exist, they are notorious in Africa for their lack of precision.¹⁰ This widespread problem of the “poverty of educational data”, as the World Bank calls it, compounded the difficulties encountered in the collection of reliable education statistics.¹¹ While examples of this official data are used in Chapters Two and Four because they do offer indications of major trends, readers are cautioned to refer to the accompanying notes and their indications of the limitations of certain figures and estimates.

The compilation of empirical data on educational practice conducted for this study of these cities, therefore, has striven to include examination of levels below those of the grand national aggregations of state-wide enrollments and adult literacy rates in order to assess the situation in particular urban locations. Short of undertaking the near impossible task of physically counting children in classrooms and counting schools in neighborhoods, social science researchers in these three cities will find precious little quantitative data on local education readily available. In some cases, revelation by a district administrator or school principal of exact enrollment numbers is politically dangerous because it would reveal or confirm ethnic imbalances in enrollments. In other cases, cadres in the relevant bureaucracies have no more than a rough estimate of the number of children and schools in local districts and are hesitant to share information they know not to be accurate. For example, the lack of readily available or accurate data in all three cities led the author to create the carte scolaire for Yaoundé II that appears in Chapter Five and to scour newspaper accounts and advertisements for data on new schools in Nairobi a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Promise and Deception of Modern Education in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 3 Social Class, Civil Society, and Political Analysis in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 4 Schooling and Social Stratification in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 5 Cameroon: Parents’ Organizations, Private Schools, and the Development of Educational Privilege
• 6 Returning to Class: Congo and the Social Costs of a Collapsed Education System
• 7 Enhancing the Status Quo: Kenya and the Consolidation of Educational Privilege
• 8 Schooling for a New Century: Diversity for All, Opportunity for the Few
• Bibliography
• Index