Mbilinyi, Marjorie (2000) “Equity, Justice and transformation in Education: the challenges of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Today” in Nyerere: Student, Teacher, Humanist, Statesman: Occasional paper series no. 84 Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Center for African Studies.
Nyerere espoused “education as liberation” – focus on access, content, and quality in a single unified system.
All children have the right to a basic education
1974 - Musoma Resolutions – called for a campaign in support of universal primary education – without school fees. Mbilinyi writes of villagers building schools on their own, with government perhaps offering teachers and maybe a mabati roof.
“Free school” not free – parents paid taxes, bought uniforms, notebooks, textbooks, other supplies.
UPE raised participation in primary schools from 50% (pre-1974) to over 90% (1984).
p. 41: “Education for Self-Reliance was a direct call for liberating education, in contrast to the kind of education then available in the late 1960s. ESR criticized the existing education system for being individualistic, competitive, and based on rote memory learning. . . . Earlier education reforms had made the content more ‘Tanzanian’ and ‘African’, by teaching about local leaders and traditional rulers, for example, rather than the Queen and Kings of England. Kiswahili was adopted as the medium of instruction, beginning with the primary level, but with the intention of extending it right up to the University level.”
p. 44: “. . . ESR was calling for an enquiring mind, critical thinking and self-confidence among students at all levels.”
With the financial constraints of the late 1970s, Nyerere’s education policies – arising from Education for Self-Reliance and buttressed by Musoma Resolution ideas on universal primary education could not be maintained. Eventually, Tanzania sought international assistance, and had to turn to the World Bank and IMF. As Mbilinyi points out, one early determination from the WB/IMF group was that - page 46: ‘Tanzanians were told by World Bank representatives and consultants that ‘your country is too poor to have universal primary education’, a cynical justification for the rowing education inequalities at global level between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ nations and peoples.”
Enrollment drops from 98% in 1980 to 71% by 1988, before rising again to 78% in 1997 – still more than 20% lower than 20 years prior.
p. 49: “Privatization and liberalization have therefore led to the creation of a dualistic education system, one for the rich, and one for the poor, with a middle education system of ‘best’ public schools for the middle classes. This is against the principles of equity and justice promoted by Mwalimu which were incorporated into education reforms in the 1970s. The marker of difference is no longer race as in the colonial days, but class. We may find shortly that class inequalities are far more explosive.”
