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ERIC Number: ED269343
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1985
Pages: 14
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Educational Developmentalism in Nigeria: Education for the Masses or Just Mass Education?
Cobern, William W.; Junaid, Mal. M. I.
A free and pluralistic society is maintained by constitutional guarantees and an educated populace. Nigeria, like other nations in West Africa, spent billions of dollars and embarked on a program of mass educational improvement in the 1960's and 1970's. While secondary school enrollment increased eleven times between 1962 and 1975, over half the candidates on the West African Examinations Council secondary test failed. This indicates a failure of the Nigerian educational policy of "developmentalism," which states that centralized educational reform is the quickest and surest way to bring about modernization and an improved standard of living. While Nigerian school facilities and teacher training methods are often poor, they must not bear the full blame. Early mission schools and traditional Islamic schools had poor facilities and ill-trained teachers, yet they succeeded in providing effective basic education. Reasons for these more recent failures include the application of factory or industrial plant improvement strategies to education and the use of utilitarian (or purely quantitative) measures of success. (CFR)
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Nigeria
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A