How Descent‐Based Hierarchies and Youth Culture Shape Secondary School Engagement in Senegal

Abstract

Research on the effects of mass schooling on social cleavages in Africa ignores descent-based hierarchies despite their affecting 218 million people on the continent. In contrast, I show how pursuit of social mobility and honor to overcome descent-based discrimination underpinned Haalpulaar parents' and youths' engagement with secondary school in Senegal. This included youth developing a counter-culture oppositional to school values through appropriation of popular culture, a rarely documented outcome of EFA in the Global South. [secondary schooling, descent-based hierarchies, Senegal, identity, youth culture]School has done a lot to level these issues of caste. Anyone can be intelligent, even from an inferior caste. On the one hand, someone might think to himself, "Why, that person has succeeded, but he is supposed to be inferior to me!" While the person he is referring to says, "Well, why shouldn't I succeed?!" We also teach human rights, so that pupils know that they are equal.

Preservation of traditional values as the basis for responsible and safe behaviour of young people

“…Youth culture is formed on the basis of mass culture promoted in the media, online communities and often comes into conflict with the policy of values of educational organizations. A. Newman speaks about such examples in his publication [12]. The potential of the parent family is not being used enough to preserve traditional values and resist mass culture.…”