ABSTRACT
The recent scheme in the Republic of Kiribati to universalize Junior Secondary education is possibly the largest intervention since the introduction of missionary schooling in the 1800s. The desires that motivated this move, however, appeared much earlier in the 1950s when I-Kiribati began to participate in colonial governance. Parliamentary records reveal numerous petitions by I-Kiribati representatives lobbying for expansion of educational services and subsequent rejections by British officials whose approach to colonial administration was at best miserly (Tabai, 1987). However, the political expediency of opening up secondary schooling has been recognized by a series of post-independence Kiribati governments. After the departure of the British in 1979 the number of secondary schools increased, albeit barely within what economic conditions would allow, until, by the mid 1990s, fifty percent of primary students were placed in secondary schooling. The government’s quantum leap in 1997 to universalize secondary schooling was made justifiable, despite continuing economic constraints, by wider global pressures to provide basic ‘education for all’ (EFA).
