Personal account of an experimentaleducational reform programme of secondary education and vocational training undertaken in Botswana in 1962 - describes a series of innovations such as the establishment of training brigades for primary school leavers unaccommodated by the small secondary school system, and asserts that secondary education should be a focal point of economic development and that educational policies should be coordinated with programmes for the creation of relevant employment opportunities. Illustrations.
Patrick van Rensburg (1931–2017) was an anti-apartheid activist and self-made ‘alternative educationist’ whose work received international recognition with the Right Livelihood Award in 1981. Born in KwaZulu-Natal into what he described as a ‘very ordinary South African family that believed in the virtue of racism’, Van Rensburg became a self-styled rebel who tirelessly pursued his own vision of a brighter future for emerging societies in post-colonial southern Africa. His emotional and intellectual struggle against his upbringing and cultural roots led him to reject his life of white privilege in South Africa. Determined to prevent the emergence of a privileged black elite in post-colonial society, he devoted his life to implementing an alternative, egalitarian approach to education, focusing on quality and functional schooling for the majority. Rewarded with the internationally prestigious Right Livelihood Award for his unique contribution to education, he saw this work as a ‘necessary tool of development’. Exiled from South Africa in 1960 because of his involvement in the London boycott campaign that gave birth to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Van Rensburg moved to Botswana (then Bechuanaland). There he founded cooperatives, provided vocational training and was among the earliest educationists to espouse the discipline of development studies. Perhaps his best-known legacy is the Swaneng Hill School, which he founded to provide an educational home for primary school ‘dropouts’ through a curriculum that combined theory and practice, and academic and manual labour. He involved his pupils in building their school, running it, providing their own food, and making their own equipment and furniture. Van Rensburg was an innovative and charismatic visionary who captured the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century, and whose work and vision still have resonance for debates in educational policy today.
This book draws on evidence from a large number of developing countries to assess the impact of market reforms on the provision of education and health services. The contributors show that approaches that seek merely to pass more of their costs to consumers perform less well than is often claimed and that improved cost-effectiveness of health and education systems requires far more than changes in the sources and mechanisms of obtaining finance.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book takes an expansive view of vocational education and training. Drawing on case studies across rural and urban Uganda and South Africa, the book offers a new way of seeing this through an exploration of the multiple ways in which people learn to have better livelihoods.
This revised and expanded second edition of African Politics in Comparative Perspective reviews fifty years of research on politics in Africa and addresses some issues in a new light, keeping in mind the changes in Africa since the first edition was written in 2004. The book synthesizes insights from different scholarly approaches and offers an original interpretation of the knowledge accumulated in the field. Goran Hyden discusses how research on African politics relates to the study of politics in other regions and mainstream theories in comparative politics. He focuses on such key issues as why politics trumps economics, rule is personal, state is weak and policies are made with a communal rather than an individual lens. The book also discusses why in the light of these conditions agriculture is problematic, gender contested, ethnicity manipulated and relations with Western powers a matter of defiance.
Skills training programmes with particular reference to rural youth; Young farmer training through the home project approach an experience in the South Pacific; Chinese rural youth the long march toward education; New perspectives for rural youth in Zambia; International Youth year and rural younth work; A rural training programme that changes lives; Rural development in a small island state; the case of Tonga; Developing community drama: an experience in Chaibasa, India;Community development among the Caribs of Dominica; In service training of extension staff; a sucessful Ghanaian experience; Grass-roots training in India; Rural youth; further resources.
