NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
Economic Growth and Curriculum Reform in Southern Africa
By Linda Chisholm, HSRC, South Africa
Email: LChisholm@HSRC.ac.zaKeywords
Southern Africa, Curriculum Reform
Summary
This paper focuses on the adoption of learner-centred education as a major curriculum innovation to address political and economic goals in the 1990s in southern Africa. It argues that sustainability has been far from the centre of concern despite statements to the contrary within either national curricular or aid agency statements of policy intent.
Research on sustainable development in education focuses more often on the messages that education and the curriculum might carry about sustainable development than about how national economies might grow and develop in order that national educational ambitions might be more sustainable (King, 2007: 97). Both national governments and donor agencies are rhetorically more concerned with educational reform as vehicles for economic and political change than with the actual financial conditions and measures necessary to ensure their sustainability. These issues are explored in this paper which focuses on the adoption of learner-centred education as a major curriculum innovation to address political and economic goals in the 1990s in southern Africa (Tabulawa, 1997; 2003; Jansen, 2004; Harley and Wedekind, 2004). It focuses specifically on the reasons on the one hand for the ready acceptance of the ideas and on the other for learner-centred education not taking root. Sustainability has been far from the centre of concern despite statements to the contrary within either national curricular or aid agency statements of policy intent.
In contemporary contexts of enhanced international competitiveness, national educational performance has become increasingly important. How teachers teach and learners learn has become more important than what they learn. Replacing rote, call-and-response forms of learning with more ?modern,? learner-centred styles has become an item of interest linked to the achievement of EFA and Millennium Development Goals where access and quality are conjoined. The achievement of quality education is seen as critical to the success of increased access, and often includes the notion of learner-centred education.
Promotion of learner-centred education has a long history in African education, but research seems to point to little success. Even though the ideas have spread in different ways, there is little evidence in practice of changed modes of teaching and learning. In the 1990s, southern African countries such as Namibia and South Africa adopted what are in essence learner-centred approaches to curriculum. Adoption of learner-centred ideas in southern Africa was conditioned by prior histories of alternative education and expectations of what education could achieve. The idea and practice of Education with Production (EwP) spread in the 1970s as a form of international cooperation to ensure sustainable national economic development. It embodied educational ideas sympathetic to the adoption of learner-centred education.
Learner-centred and outcomes-based education in the 1990s found local favour because they were not entirely new ideas, and were ambiguous enough to be seen as key vehicles for achieving not so much educational, as broader economic, social and political goals. This goal they shared with EwP, although with less of the attention to growth and sustainability than Education with Production had incorporated This paper argues that implementation of learner-centred education as a national initiative faltered in the 1990s not only because it was a neo-liberal imposition or clashed with local African ways of teaching and learning, but also because it was expected on the one hand to achieve economic and other ideals which it could not do and on the other was implemented in contexts where capacities and requirements for its realization varied enormously.
In other words, learner-centred education is unsustainable without major financial assistance to provide the conditions necessary for successful learning and teaching in all classrooms in the region. If, as has been pointed out by many writers, learner-centred education is more likely to be achieved in classrooms where children and teachers have the necessary social, cultural and economic capital, then it means that its achievement in all classrooms requires massive economic support not only to change conditions in schools, but also the social and economic conditions in which communities live. This, in turn, is not achievable by donor support alone.
External international pressures and financial support have played a significant role in the introduction of learner-centred education in southern Africa since the 1970s, although the purposes, players, conditions, modalities and successes have differed over time and place. Most recently, curriculum change has also been mandated by loan conditionalities, albeit in broad terms as part of quality reforms. Regional entrepreneurs have also played a role in ensuring the spread of the ideas. Almost without exception, there is little concern with the local economic conditions necessary for sustainability of these apparently improved methods of teaching and learning. Both national governments and donors appear locked in a discourse of how educational and curriculum change, focused on learner-centred education, can change political and economic conditions without any real, complementary concern with the continuing cost of the interventions, and increasing the real economic capacity of countries and not only national governments to sustain them.
References
Harley, K. and Wedekind. V. (2004). Political change, curriculum change and social formation, 1990-2002. In: Linda Chisholm (Ed). Changing Class: Education and Social Change in post-Apartheid South Africa, Cape Town, HSRC Press.
Jansen, J. (2004). Importing Outcomes-based Education into South Africa: Policy borrowing in a post-communist World. In: David Phillips and Karl Ochs (Eds). Educational Policy Borrowing: Historical Perspectives. Oxford, Symposium Books.
King, K. (2007). Education, skills, sustainability and growth. Southern African Review of Education, 13 (2).
Tabulawa, R. (1997). Pedagogical classroom practice and social context: the Case of Botswana. International Journal of Educational Development, 17 (2).
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