Educating citizens for Tanzania

Abstract

For more than a century Africans living in what is now Tanzania have been exposed-- increasingly as the years have passed--to the values, customs, and scientific knowledge of the Western and, to a lesser extent Eastern worlds. Of the many channels of transmission, certainly one of the most important has been the growing network of institutions imparting formal, predominately literary education to children. Introduced by Christian missionaries and later supported and regulated by colonial governments, schools and colleges based largely on European models have gradually displaced tribal, clan and even family educational systems as the chief means of preparing a sizeable proportion of the youth of the country for adulthood. When independence came, the TANU government found itself on the horns of dilemma: it became responsible for a system of formal education that was playing an important role in the socialization of the young and, indeed, had been an important factor in the growth of nationalism, but which was ill-adapted-- despite a few well-intentioned experimental innovations by the colonial government--to the processes of economic development, social change, and political mobilization and integration.