ABSTRACT
Summary: This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the form and content of Lifelong Basic education Reform (LBER) presendy being promoted specifically for the ‘absolute poor’ in Africa. A critique of LBER is developed which sets the reform in the context of African under-developed economies. By exploring the LBER critique of schooling systems, and its own programme, it is possible to identify the underlying problem which LBER cannot adequately confront or resolve. This is the growing impoverishment of peasants, which forces them to seek alternative means of subsistence in wage labour or in informal occupations. Since schooling remains the gateway to wage labour occupations, the tremendous expansion in schooling is thereby explainable.
It is argued that LBER has risen in response to schooling expansion and growing peasant impoverishment, in order to create a differentiated and dual education system which would contribute to the social control of the masses in the poorest countries of Africa and elsewhere. The development of an alternative education reform movement in Africa is identified, which provides the peasants and workers with the skills, knowledge and consciousness necessary to engage in the struggle for national liberation and socialist revolution.
