Abstract: | The present article serves as introduction to three consecutive volumes of 'The Conch', viz. volumes 9 (1977), 10 (1978), and 11 (1979). wich grew directly out of an interdisciplinary seminar on education and politics in tropical Africa, sponsored by the African Studies Program at the University of Illinois in the Spring of 1975. In it the author, who is director of the Program, sets the context for the seminar and discusses in outline several aspects of the topic in question, such as inequality and ethnicity, unemployment and underdevelopment, curricular reform, and financing the educational system. Africa has accepted the challenge of building a new society and it regards education as an important instrument to achieve this goal. This is the basis of politics of education - the commitment of a political society to redesign itself through the instrument of education. Ref. |