ABSTRACT
Africa’s many formalistic, teacher-centred traditions require students to learn revealed knowledge. Reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1990s have usually attempted to move from teacher-centred to child-centred pedagogy. Widespread evidence from 12 Anglophone countries demonstrates that progressive influences have been strong at the policy level but have not translated to paradigm shift in the classroom, so that schools abound with the remains of unproductive progressive reforms. Many studies illustrate theoretical and methodological limitations, as well as the remarkable difficulty of replacing the formalistic paradigm with progressivism. The failures have generally been attributed to structural conditions, but the more insightful studies point to cultural incompatibility. The profound reason for formalism’s continuing prevalence is that classroom behaviours are intuitively influenced by teachers’, students’ and parents’ intergenerational beliefs about the nature of knowledge, how it should be transmitted, and their perceptions of the role of examinations in increasing students’ life chances. The cultural roots of revelatory epistemology about the nature of truth and how it should be revealed are the basis for formalistic educational paradigms that provide long-lasting patterns for teachers’ and students’ behaviour.
