Dignity of Labour for African Leaders ― The Formation of Education Policy in the British Colonial Office and Achimota School

Based on the author's PhD dissertation from 2003, this book examines the discourse in education for Africans from 1910 until the 1930s, focusing on the Memorandum on Education Policy in British Tropical Africa, the educational policy guidelines issued by the British Colonial Office in 1923, and the Achimota School established on the Gold Coast Colony in 1927 as a model school for training African leaders, looking at interactions at the global and local level, as well as the structure, actors, norms, and context of the discourse. It uses archival research and interviews with graduates of schools in the region to discuss literature on the history of education and politics in colonial Africa, theories on global exchanges of ideas and transfer of educational models, and equilibrium between general and vocational education; the context in which the issues on African education were discussed, including the political economy and colonialism; the main actors involved in the discourse and the roles played by them, including mission societies, American philanthropists, and individuals like Thomas Jesse Jones, J.H. Oldham, and James Aggrey; the normative aspect of the colonial discussion on education and educational models and ideas that influenced the philosophical discussion about African education, including American progressive educational philosophies, an agricultural and industrial education model for the African American population, and British moralism rooted in Victorian era education; the discourse at the national and institutional level, including the political context on the Gold Coast, the main actors involved in educational discourse in the Gold Coast Colony, and the philosophical debates about African education and Achimota as an experimental school; the case of Achimota and British colonial education in discussion of the vocational and general secondary education in Ghana and the world; and implications of the study for policy analysis and African historiography. Distributed in North America by the African Books Collective. Annotation ©2018 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)