Europeans have been largely responsible for the near disastrous attitudes towards education that have developed in much of the third world. They could hardly be blamed for taking their western standards of living with them when they went to live in the tropical world, but their way of life was certainly very different from that of the people among whom they settled.
The villagers took note. These newcomers, whether s administrations, traders, mine supervisors or missionaries, occupied weatherproof bungalows that were better than a chief’s hut. They had three adequate meals a day, reclined on comfortable furniture, possessed the amenities of paraffin lighting (followed later by electricity), a telephone and a bathroom. They traveled in a car or some other sort of vehicle; certainly they seldom walked. They employed servants to do all the menial tasks. And, as far as the villagers understood work, they did no work at all. They talked or they sat on their backsides at desks.
All this, to the peasant of the third world, is very appealing and he thinks that the key to this paradise is education. Once a man is educated, he too can sit in an office and give orders to his inferiors. A peasant family will therefore sacrifice much to get at least a few members educated.Attitudes towards education are also very largely due to the errors of the first schools. The early educationalists, with the best intentions, transplantd a European system into alien soil. The first generation of scholars learnt Latin, European history, European geography, European law and similar subjects that bore no relationship to their daily life.
In the early 1970s a teacher found that her east African pupils could recite the rivers of Europe but could not even name the great river which flowed six miles away. Because what they learned at school seemed to have so little relevance to their daily life, generations of students came to regard e education as contained in watertight compartments.
Education was the key to the way of escape to a better life. It was nothing more. A person learnt all those facts about remote places and events for one purpose only, and that was to pass the examination which produced the valuable diploma, degree or certificate. Armed with that, one was entitled to a good job which gave one a seat at a desk and authority to give order to less qualified persons.
So this attitude became so widespread and deep-rooted that it was applied to all subjects taught in schools. Wise agricultural officials in a West African country assured me that once agriculture was taught as a subject in a school, with an examination at the end of the course, the students would be lost for ever to any practical work on farms. ‘They will have passed an examination’, they said, ‘which they think should entitle them to something better.’
