Some say that a teacher should perform miracles and demonstrate wonders; however, what is needed is that he should possess all that the student needs.
Muhiyudin Ibn el Arabi.

There was at the time of independence a great faith in the virtues of the western education system. The westerners were seen to be rich and possessed lots of desirable techniques and goods. It was somehow assumed that the key to acquiring the knowledge of the westerners was to adopt their school and university system. But this raises the rather fundamental question: How far is the western technological culture passed on by the school system? When you decide to introduce knowledge into a community it would be good to discover the best means of transmitting it.

It is quite possible that the rôle of the schools in transmitting the technological culture is a good deal smaller than many people, especially teachers, like to think. Or at least, there are many other modes of transmission. Small boys tinker with bicycles, watch their fathers repair cars, play with mechanical toys, such as Meccano. All these are ways of becoming familiar with the bases of western culture, many of which are seldom spoken about. The idea of cause and effect, which is not necessarily shared with other cultures, or not in the same form, is so ingrained in our culture, in the air as it were, that it is picked up unconsciously by almost everyone in our culture, even if they never practice engineering or the obvious cultural formulations of the idea.
The schools which were set up in Africa generally copied the British schools in almost every respect. That is the methods of organisation and the syllabus were very similar. The academic exams were based on the British models.

But there was a lot missing. Once (1966) in Kenya I offered a prize to the students to build a solar concentrator. The conditions were that they had to build a device which would boil a litre of water in 30 minutes beginning with water at room temperature. They were to use only solar energy. I made available books which described the process, though I didn't explicitly tell them to read them. In the school there were students studying A-level sciences.

One student won the prize with a device built of cardboard and aluminium foil. He tested it. It didn't quite work. He saw that it wasn't quite big enough and added an extra area of reflector. It then worked. He showed scientific thought. The point of this is that he was exceptional. The other entrants showed that they thought science was a matter of magic or cookery. One group brought in a car headlight reflector. They had learned that the solution had something to do with parabolas and that the headlamp contained a parabolic reflector. This presumably shows the sign of more knowledge than zero, but they had no idea of quantity. They brought in their entry for the competition, set it up and left it in the sun for half an hour. At the end of this time the water was as warm as it would have been without any concentration. In fact they had not put it at the focus, nor had they used a litre. I believe that their entry, which was representative of the attitude of the student body (A-level science students, following a course like a British one) was the result of not having had the kind of experience of everyday technology which almost every young person in a western society has.
It is unrealistic to believe that the school as copied from the west can provide these experiences. Only if we recognise the need can teachers begin to provide activities which may give students experiences of the kind they need.

The English Block represented an example of the ways in which the school can be enabled to provide a wider range of experiences. The EB didn't deal with science, though a similar approach could, but with language.

How did the harmful attitude to schools come about? Is it the West's secret weapon to continue world domination by keeping the former colonials ignorant? Not really. No committee of evil geniuses could bamboozle people into having such a reverence for the school system. Like most things it is a product of muddle and bad thinking. Most educated westerners themselves have an exaggerated respect for their school systems and haven't noticed the important amount of learning which takes place before and outside the schools. (Many Americans, however, have grown exasperated with their own often rigid and unimaginative school systems and may be heard to claim that they have not learned much through it - often, alas, true.)

It is the origins of the technological revolution which throw light on the mode of transmission of technological knowledge. It seems reasonable to accept that the industrial revolution came from two main sources. The first was the expertise possessed by traditional craftsmen, including blacksmiths, millwrights and masons. (James Brindley, for example was a millwright) This was the result of centuries of slow evolution. The development of building skills can be traced back to the 10th century. The watermill has been shown to have existed in at least the 13th century (I need to do research on this). The other strand was the scientific knowledge which in England was developed not in the traditional universities but in the dissenting academies (the colleges set up to cater for those who for religious reasons were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge), the ad hoc societies (such as Birmingham's Lunar Society?), and by rich amateurs. The point here is that all these people were making it up as they went along. They were not using educational institutions copied from somewhere else. (The Universities tried to recreate the classical world). It is possible to argue that too much institutionalisation prevents the creativity which is an essential component of learning and development. For example institutions in which the teachers entirely control what the students do tend to lead to "learning" for the purpose of exams, much of which of course is forgotten afterwards, because the students did not want to learn it from their own choice. Transformational Grammar is a good example. It is well known that there is a good deal of this false learning going on in schools. (It is discussed by John Holt in How Children Fail and How Children Learn). Should we just accept it as a necessary part of the system? Or would it be better to recognise it as a waste of students' time when they should be doing what they need.

John Holt - How Children Fail


How Children Fail (Classics in child development)

see also his other books: How children learn