In working to build a sense of nationhood, Ghana has focused on many social engineering projects, the most meaningful and fascinating of which has been the state's effort to create a national culture through its schools. As Cati Coe reveals in Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools, this effort has created an unusual paradox: while Ghana encourages its educators to teach about local cultural traditions, those traditions are transformed as they are taught in school classrooms. The state version of culture now taught by educators has become objectified and nationalized—vastly different from local traditions. Coe identifies the state's limitations in teaching cultural knowledge and discusses how Ghanaians negotiate the tensions raised by the competing visions of modernity that nationalism and Christianity have created. She reveals how cultural curricula affect authority relations in local social organizations—between teachers and students, between Christians and national elite, and between children and elders—and raises several questions about educational processes, state-society relations, the production of knowledge, and the making of Ghana's citizenry.

Using the Education for All (EFA) global movement as the setting, this book surveys the complex labyrinths of international education policy making, the design and implementation of system-wide educational reform, and the assessment of learning outcomes in the African context. It addresses the following questions: what does it mean for African states to reform their educational systems to meet the global agenda of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals? Under what structural conditions have African governments implemented universal primary education programs, and with what outcomes? What are the lessons learned and how do these inform the post-2015 agenda for universal primary education in Africa and other developing countries? This book provides answers to these questions and opens the possibilities for new approaches to Education for All in the context of constrained resources, unstable political climates, and the agency of local communities. It is undeniable that African governments responded to the educational goals espoused in EFA and MDG paradigms through their own “education for all” plans and expended vast resources to realize these objectives. However, there remains a serious gap in knowledge about the design of these plans, the influence of local and international forces in their development, the challenges inherent in executing comprehensive and multifaceted reforms to achieve these goals, and the success of the reform measures as evident in student learning outcomes. This book addresses this knowledge gap in three ways. First, it utilizes empirical data collected over a five-year period from six African countries—Kenya, Mali, Senegal, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda—to illuminate how the global agenda on education has been debated, designed, and implemented across the continent, and with what outcomes. Second, it frames the six nation case studies within the wider logic of international educational policy agenda and the continent-wide search for education quality. Finally, the analysis of universal primary education strategies is undertaken from an interdisciplinary perspective thereby allowing a more comprehensive view of the educational reform.

Many people believe education in Africa is in a state of crisis. More than 45 million African children do not attend school. In many places, classes are held outside, under tents or trees, and schools often do not have such essential supplies as chalk and textbooks. Yet there have also been significant improvements in recent years. More young Africans are able to attend school today than a generation ago, and the governments of many countries are attempting to address the problems in their educational systems. This book chronicles the development of educational systems in Africa, from the colonial era to the present day. It examines the current state of education in Africa, discussing the effect that the continents poverty has on funding schools and explaining the persistence of educational inequalities.

The contribution of Western education to the creation of an African-educated elite is well documented. What is not equally well documented is the fact that African-educated elites have used their education and the schools to perpetuate their dominance by denying the poor the knowledge necessary to protect their political and economic rights and to advance in society. On the other hand, educated elites in Africa make opportunities available to their own members through selective ordering, legitimization of certain language forms and learning processes in schools, and legitimization of elite codes and experiences to the exclusion of the histories, experiences, and worldviews of the poor. This book highlights the processes by which the poor in Africa have been disenfranchised and marginalized through schools' ascriptive mechanisms, and explains why African economic development is very slow.