ABSTRACT

This chapter assesses the role that education has played in ongoing attempts to reach the goal, and some of the tensions involved in the process. It structures around the following issues: preparing an effective workforce to meet the needs of a technologically sophisticated, increasingly complex and globalizing world; shifts in the role of education related to actual or perceived challenges to the nation-state; and various attempts to use education to reinforce national cohesion in a context of ethnic and cultural diversity. As quantitative access to education increased in tandem with improvements in the quality of educational opportunities, changes in attitudes and behaviour on the part of people living under colonial rule started an awakening amongst the general public, for a more equable society and one not governed by an outside power. Higher education was thus assuming a more prominent role in efforts to press education into the service of an explicitly nation-building agenda.