American Influence on African Education: The Role of the Phelps-Stokes Fund's Education Commissions

Forty Years of Education and Development: from optimism to uncertainty

“…The 1910 Edinburgh Conference of Missionary Societies raised the issue of the need to develop practical and relevant education and rural development programmes. This view was taken up by the influential Phelps-Stokes' Commission Reports in the early 1920s, which advocated vocational and agricultural education programmes, and was applied in the Jeanes schools of East Africa (Berman, 1971). The famous 1925 memorandum on Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa developed the ideas, though they were further refined in the 1935 Memorandum on Education in African Communities and the 1943 Memorandum on Mass Education in African Society.…”

Vocationalizing the secondary school curriculum: The African experience

“…The concept of adaptation led to an emphasis on education being 'practical' and 'functional' and therefore closely related to life in the rural areas where the great majority of Africans lived. The educational commissions sent to Africa by the Phelps-Stokes fund of New York also exerted a strong influence on vocational education, especially in the British colonial territories (Berman, 1971(Berman, , 1972. The educational commissions sent to Africa by the Phelps-Stokes fund of New York also exerted a strong influence on vocational education, especially in the British colonial territories (Berman, 1971(Berman, , 1972.…”

The Divergence of Art from “African Culture”: From Achimota to the Educational Reforms of 1986 in Ghana's Art Education

“…Achimota represented a new model for West African education when it opened in the Gold Coast in 1927. It was inspired by the recommendations of the Phelps-Stokes Fund's African Education Commission to adapt schools for Africans' practical needs, drawing on the example of the Tuskegee Institute in the United States (Berman, 1971;Foster, 1965;Kingsley Williams, 1962). In fact, one of Achimota's three founders, Dr Aggrey, was also a member of that Commission.…”