Educational Planning: Politics, Ideology, and Development

When we begin to talk about planning in any society, we are immediately confronted with a whole range of ambiguities. First, are we talking about persuasion or prescription about the future allocation of resources in the society? Are we considering the operation of a technical sector where all issues will be decided by equations and empirical studies? Do we have adequate information about the present, much less the past and its trends or the future? Who will be actually planning for whom? These questions and many others are endemic to any consideration of the social and political environment of the polity under consideration but will also demand clear judgments about what values are important for that society as well as about the dynamics of history and change which will guide what is actually likely to happen. The conceptual difficulties involved in any sort of planning and the complexity of all societies within which one might undertake planning have combined to make me quite skeptical of most planning procedures outside of a few areas of human concern where there is no dispute about the measures of value, although even there (the market place and/or military body count) one finds room for great dispute about the values measured in relation to the goals of the larger society. This general skepticism about planning has led me to cast a cold eye on the planning processes I have observed in developing countries as well as those in which I have participated in this country. Therefore, I propose in this brief paper to raise the questions of the skeptic about planning as they apply to the particular area with which I have had some experience, that is, education, and as the processes have been manifested in countries with which I have some familiarity, in this case in Africa, particularly Kenya and Tanzania. However, before raising these questions within the context of developing societies, I believe it is a useful exercise to see that the questions all emerge in post-industrial settings as well. Therefore, I shall begin by raising the questions in quite general terms and putting these questions in the context of one developed society—our own. Then, I shall move to a consideration of how the questions themselves might be affected by the institutional context of the developing country, and, in particular, two developing countries with very different conceptions of their present and future—Kenya and Tanzania.