Education and national development: The continuing problem of misdiagnosis and irrelevant prescriptions

If the period of the fifties and sixties was one of the great hopes, visionary dreams and exuberant optimism among planners and managers of educational systems among both the Western Industrialized Nations (WINS) and the Third World Nations (TWNs), today in the eighties the mood is at best one of guarded optimism and muted goals, and at worst pessimism and hopeless despair as the world witnesses one of the most prolonged periods of economic recession. And as if this is not enough, many nations, especially in the Third World, are beset by widespread political disintegration and anarchy; mass population migrations precipitated by armed conflicts and famine; mass violations of basic human-rights for reasons of ideology, class, colour, etc.; mass famine and starvation; and the list goes on. Under these circumstances, the publication of the book under review here: World Crisis in Education: The View from the Eighties (Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 1985) by Philip H. Coombs, occasions an assessment of the role of education in national development -especially among the TWNs who are relative newcomers to the realm of Western-style formal education-as we approach and look beyond the year 2000. It is now almost axiomatic that any comprehensive discussion, from a global perspective, of education and its role in national development must commence by going back to the period at the end of the sixties when the bubble of exaggerated optimism regarding this role eventually burst under the weight of harsh contradictory facts. Facts that were unearthed by a number of important studies amongst which was Philip H. Coombs’ World Education Crisis: A Systems Analysis (Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 1968) to which the present book is a sequel. In that earlier book as in the present, Coombs marshalled hard-hitting sobering data to demonstrate that all was not well in the educational arena all across the globe and most especially among Third World Nations. Among the TWNs specifically, as the U.N.sponsored First Development Decade came to a close, the stark reality of the situation was that despite the massive increases in educational expenditures of these countries they were nowhere near embarking upon the Rostowian ‘take-off trajectory. It became increasingly obvious to development experts that education had not only failed to resolve, but they felt, rightly or wrongly, that it had exacerbated such problems as the following: (a) the massive unemployment amongst school-leavers as ever increasing numbers of graduates of the colonia~y inherited, unreformed and steeply pyramidical formal educational system poured out onto a supersaturated labour market; (b) the large scale, lemming-like, rural to urban migration of youth, as thousands of school-leavers, inappropriately equipped by schools with skills and attitudes relevant primarily to urban rather than rural existence, flocked to urban areas in search of ‘white collar’ jobs (bringing in their wake overstrained city budgets, unemployment, unbearable pressure on social amenity systems, social anomie, etc.); and (c) the failure of ag~cultural development-when