Rethinking education and social cohesion in Ethiopia, 1941--1994.

摘要

This essay seeks to understand the Ethiopian condition and to place the education policy debate within the social capital/social cohesion conceptual frame. The goal is to prescribe a macro education strategy that is responsive to local needs and external pressures, and one that optimizes resource allocation. Education is central to fostering social cohesion in any polity. Hence, literate societies tend to have functioning institutions as well as politically and economically active populations. Literacy entails a relative level of high trust that transcends the family unit, class, and ethnicity; increase in knowledge positively impacts social trust (Fukuyama, 1995; Putnam, 2000).; Education in Ethiopia is marked by discontinuities and interventions---indeed, the telltale signs of social stress (Prior & Mellor, 2002). The fact that Ethiopia withstood colonialism and possessed an indigenous scripted national language did not give it a comparative advantage over Sub-Saharan African countries. These factors have made the Ethiopian condition uniquely complex. Any attempt to understand this complexity, therefore, demands the application of multiple analytical perspectives. It becomes significant to observe how each component interacts with others, how parts relate to the whole, and that the parts are not primary in and of themselves. In other words, paying close attention to the context and to the mundane, identifying patterns across time and divides, and generating questions and reflection have been found to yield better results than otherwise (Schuller, 2001; Yin, 1984). To this end, special attention is given to literature by native scholars and the imperative of bridging societal gaps by establishing a specific type of leadership is suggested.