Education for Alternative Development

A 20-year effort to expand schooling in the Third World has largely succeeded: in 1960 there were 144 million pupils in developing country (excluding the People's Republic of China and Korea) primary and secondary schools, and in 1976, 335 million; university-level enrollment increased from 2.6 million to 12.5 million in the same period.' Even in relative terms, the figures are impressive: 46.8 percent of 6-11-year-olds in developing countries attended school in 1960 and 61.8 percent in 1975.2 Yet schooling was supposed to do much more than expand. Twenty years ago, "experts" implied that educational growth not only would contribute forcefully to economic development3 but would also equalize opportunities between social classes and income distribution4 and develop a more employable labor force. It may be that additional schooling in labor force did increase productivity--indeed there is some reason to believe that it has.5 But at the same time, the absolute number of illiterates in the Third World has increased;6 the poorest 50 percent of the population remained essentially as poor as before; income distribution, if anything, became more unequal;7 and open unemployment increased.s Poverty has been transferred more and more from rural to urban areas, while rural areas have continued to remain desperately poor. It is tempting to argue that the increased education brought to Third World populations was not relevant to the development of their societies