Education and Social Transition in the Third World

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Boston University African Studies Center and Board of Trustees, Boston University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International Journal of African Historical Studies. Political theorists on the left have given increased attention during the last decade or so to the role of the state in policy formulation and implementation in developed and, to a lesser extent, underdeveloped societies. In this ambitious book Carnoy and Samoff focus on the state's role in facilitating the move away from a capitalist political economy to various stages of non-capitalist development in five transitional nations: China, Cuba, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Tanzania. More specifically, the five case studies examine the central role played by national educational systems as they are called upon to promote social development generally, while simultaneously helping to incorporate and socialize the formerly disenfranchised citizenry into the new, more egalitarian body politic.Education within these transitional states is beset by the usual political conflicts engendered by state reorganization along non-capitalist lines. Bureaucratic cadres in educational ministries frequently cannot shed the behavioral patterns learned as pivotal figures in the conditioned capitalist state which they served so recently. In addition, the new staterevolutionary in all the cases save Tanzania takes charge of a severely underdeveloped economy and is faced with the concomitant dearth of educated personnel required for increasing economic growth. Almost immediately the state is faced with the dilemma of whether to utilize its scarce resources to increase access to basic education and expanded literacy campaigns for adultsas part of the effort to mobilize the populace to support the new regimeor to allocate these toward higher education in order to enhance the production of high-level manpower required for economic growth. This is a particularly thorny issue for at least two inter-related political and educational reasons: first, the societies under examination are dedicated to eradicating the most glaring inequalities inherited from their conditioned past, and second, basic education is crucial both for its contribution to mass mobilization and as a symbol of expanding democracy, while higher education is important for pulposes of accumulation despite its anti-egalitarian nature.