The Excluding Processes
of the School System.
MAJID RAHNEMA

Excerpts from a lecture at Stanford University (16 April 1985), entitled: 'Education as Participation or Exclusion?' The full text of the lecture was published in Spanish in El Gallo, Mexico, 25 August 1985.

The school system, introduced by colonialism in countries under their rule, was soon co-opted by the emerging nation-states. It became one of the most important vehicles of development strategy, being presented to the excluded as the answer to all the problems of their 'underdevelopment', the redeeming genie which could henceforth save their children from misery and shame.

In reality, schools served other purposes. They acted as a rather efficient channel for sieving out, into the Power Establishment, their most ambitious customers. They sometimes did serve as a cultural medium for some exceptionally bright individuals who succeeded in taking advantage of the learning resources for liberating ends. Yet, as a whole, they fostered unprecedented processes of exclusion against the poor and the powerless, despite their claims to serve as a new instrument of democratization.

These excluding processes operated at a number of levels. In relation to the society at large, they destroyed all previously established systems of cultural reference. As the only recognized providers of education, they systematically discredited all previously established mechanisms that different cultures had created throughout their histories for fostering knowledge and culture. The old days described by Julius Nyerere, when 'every adult was a teacher', were over. Now, only those certified by the school system, according to its self-devised criteria, had the right to teach; and only those whose abilities were recognized by the latter could be admitted to learn.

Education thus became a scarcity. And the same system which had created this scarcity was asked to deal with it. The management and the further production of this scarcity reinforced the new economistic perception of reality, entailing a broad range of new exclusions. Literacy campaigns often turned out to be campaigns against the non-literate, rather than helping the oral populations to educate themselves and learn as they had always done. For, on the one hand, the adoption of one or two official languages at the national level - either that of the former colonial ruler, or that of the larger dominant ethnic group - excluded all the vernacular and spoken languages that had hitherto served as the main instruments of learning. On the other hand, the absence or the scarcity of any useful printed material in such languages (these often being reduced to propaganda publications by the authorities) further marginalized the non-literate and the unschooled. On the whole, such campaigns ended up creating new classes of social drop-outs.

As to the imported 'modern' schools, they acted as yet another instrument of exclusion by allowing only a small minority of their clients to acquire social recognition. Besides their own army of drop-outs (2-10 per thousand students in the case of Guinea-Bissau), all adults, peasants, women, working people of all ages, and all other learners who, for some reason, could not afford to spend long periods of their life at school, were equally excluded.

Another aspect of the schools' excluding and divisive action has been extensively analyzed: the separation of students from their parents and their cultural milieu. The instilling in them, in homeopathic doses, of new alienating values, attitudes and goals, drives them gradually to reject or even despise their own cultural and personal identity. They acquire a false sense of superiority, which turns them away from manual work, from real life and from all unschooled people, whom they tend to perceive as ignorant and under-developed.

Thus, a 'cultural gap' develops fast between the newly schooled 'elites' and the rest of the population, a phenomenon that has been largely responsible for the well-publicized rural exodus. The most 'successful' students abandon their village folk and leave, often for good, first for the big cities, later for foreign lands, fostering the process known as the 'brain drain'. As a result, the poor and the excluded pay the cost of an educational system that not only deprives them of any possibility of educating themselves but also severs them forever from some of the most potentially valuable elements of their community, from people who could have acted as their best teachers and friends in all matters concerning their liberation. As to the 'uprooted', they are set adrift, in many cases without ever being able to find new roots for themselves.

As such, the newly reformed 'national' school followed, in terms of its societal goals, the same as those assigned to the old colonial school. According to Albert Moumouni*,then governor general of France in French Africa, had summed up these goals as follows:
"Political and economic interests have imposed a two-fold task on our work in education. On the one hand, we must train indigenous cadres to become our auxiliaries in every area and assure ourselves of a meticulously chosen elite. We must also educate the masses to bring them closer to us and transform their way of life. From the political standpoint we must make known our intention of bringing people to the French way of life; from the economic viewpoint we must train the producers and consumers of tomorrow."
This consistency of the producer/consumer approach to education, conceived as an instrumental commodity, is seen in all the 'educational strategies' inspired by the development discourse.

*Albert Moumouni, Education in Africa, trans. Phyllis Nauts, Praeger, New York; André Deutsch, London, 1968.