ABSTRACT
The prominence given to education by individuals, by families, by communities, by national governments and by the international community at large leaves little room for doubting its importance in the Third World. Going to school as the prime means of acquiring an education has become almost everywhere a familiar and necessary part of growing up and playing an active part in the life of the modern state. There were certainly ‘schools’, institutions for the socialization and broad education of the young, in pre-modern societies, whether in Koranic schools in Islamic countries, in separate temporary villages for initiating young warriors in many traditional African societies, or in the training for senior administrative positions as mandarins in Imperial China. However, the twentieth century has seen an acceptance in most parts of the world of the school as a formal institution for acquiring specific and normally universally valuable skills: at base, functional literacy and numeracy. ‘Schooling’ and ‘education’ have become almost synonymous in practice, but of course ‘education’ is in reality a much broader, lifelong process. The unprecedented global expansion of schools and schooling has reached its height within the last 30 years, to the extent that in the last decade of the twentieth century the majority of children in the Third World now attend school for at least some time.
