When delegates at a 1993 United Nations meeting in Jordan began discussing educational opportunities for women, a speaker affiliated with a university in the Middle East rose to object. Derogatory references to illiterate women, she insisted, should cease. She argued that women without formal schooling often had enormous amounts of useful knowledge. In fact, she continued, such women may be among the most learned people within their societies because they possess a vast wealth of information that has not been filtered through the narrow confines of the western educational system.

The speaker, who was cheered by delegates and observers alike, was not opposed to literacy. She was objecting to the globalisation of education, the process by which even the very definition of knowledge is restricted to that which affirms the European intellectual experience. Anything that does not expressly conform to the European concept of scholarship -- be it philosophy, theories of governance, or systems of economic organisation -- is marginalised and excluded. Thus the wisdom of civilisations that emerged thousands of years before Europe's -- many of them lasting centuries longer and evolving to a higher degree of perfection -- is relegated to the status of 'ancient folklore' deserving of little more than inspection and interpretation by anthropologists.

The globalisation of ideology is not something that occurred in a vacuum, and there has never been anything accidental about it. The spread of European ideas was an essential part of the colonial period, and it continues under a global economic and political system that sees 'western values' as the solution to everything from conflict management to development.

There are two related trends leading toward a standardised world-view of learning which have accelerated to an alarming degree over the past ten or twelve years. The first is the depletion of resources for academic institutions in developing nations, and the second is the overt involvement of foreign 'aid' donors.

Since the start of economic structural adjustment in the 1980s, many of the least developed countries have been left with almost nothing in their budgets for education. The guarantee of free schooling for children, a cornerstone of the independence-era development model, has been abandoned in much of Africa, while institutions of higher learning appear on the verge of collapse.

In Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, the average wage of a university instructor has fallen so low that the salaries of professors provide less than half the income necessary for bare survival. The result, wrote Kenyan economist Oduor Ong'Wen two years ago in the Nairobi-based Sunday Nation, is that teachers now face the choice of raising chickens and running concession stands, on one hand, or migrating abroad in search of employment on the other.

The situation is equally bad in Nigeria, which was put under a World Bank structural adjustment programme in 1986. On 6 October 1995, the Washington Post ran a feature about the dismal situation of Nigeria's universities under the headline: 'Universities Flunking: Once-Proud Nigerian System Neglected.' In one of the nation's flagship universities, said the Post report, many school buildings are literally falling apart. Roofs are leaking, windows are broken, paint is peeling, garbage lies uncollected all over the campus, and a stench fills halls from toilets that have seen no maintenance for years. Many faculty members have quit, while others regularly skip teaching assignments to tend to second jobs. Often there is no paper with which to prepare assignments, and the library at one prominent learning institution has received no funds whatever since 1991.

According to Kenya's Ong'Wen, university administrators are now forced to put their efforts into cultivating ties with universities in the west because these have become the primary source of text books and equipment. As a result, he explains, 'hierarchies and divisions are ... emerging in the academic institutions between the "lucky" departments of faculty members who have access to foreign "donors" and those who don't.' The chronic scarcity of funds has led to 'the taking over of the infrastructural facilities of Africa universities by foreign agencies,' Ong'Wen says, and these groups 're-organise courses they fund while normal curriculum courses are condemned to slow asphyxiation.'

Like many critics of western-controlled lending institutions, Ong'Wen believes that foreign control of African academia is 'directly established through the loans which the World Bank gives to African governments for the reform of education.' And there is much evidence to suggest that this process of 'intellectual colonialisation' is deliberate.

When the IMF and World Bank were founded at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the U.S. government established within the Department of the Treasury the National Advisory Council on International Monetary and Financial Policies (the 'NAC'). The purpose of the NAC is to monitor U.S. investments in multilateral financial institutions to ensure that the U.S. share is maintained at a level sufficient to promote the country's interests abroad. Furthermore, in the words of the NAC's own annual report for fiscal year 1988, it is assigned 'to review proposed transactions and programmes to the extent necessary or desirable to coordinate U.S. policies.' The text continues: 'With regard to the international financial institutions, such as the World Bank... the council seeks to ensure that, to the maximum extent possible, their operations are conducted in a manner consistent with U.S. policies and objectives and with the lending and other foreign financial activities of U.S. government agencies.'

In other words, the same 'development' banks responsible for the epidemic of economic violence unleashed by structural adjustment are firmly under the control of the United States government -- and their mandates are systematically constructed so as to be 'consistent with U.S. policies and objectives.' And one does not have to look far to see how the west 'benefits' from the ensuing deprivation.

Since 1991, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has nurtured a project called University Development Linkage, part of a larger 'human capacity development' programme. The idea is to 'link' an American university with a peer school in a developing country. By mid 1996, no less than 42 such linkages were in operation in 28 developing countries. Projects are initiated at the country level, meaning that they are approved by U.S. embassy personnel overseas rather than by the central USAID office in Washington. Each 'linkage' is funded with an annual USAID grant of $100,000, and host country universities are expected to make a matching contribution -- but faculty time is considered sufficient to meet the obligation.

An official at USAID's Washington headquarters interviewed for this report insisted that the linkage projects 'are truly joint partnerships.' But the same official acknowledged that no money is actually transferred to needy universities under the operation and no funds are included to rehabilitate crumbling buildings. Supplies are financed only when used in connection with the linkage project itself.

Thus the 'partnership' -- an arrangement between one university whose funds have been gutted and another acting on behalf of the government that created the economic crisis -- is hardly a pact between equal participants. Indeed, the situation bears all the telltale marks of an emerging academic oligarchy that is global in scope.

Consider, for instance, the objectives of the linkage programme. Among other things, they include curriculum development, faculty exchange, training for instructors, and the provision of books and journals to college libraries.

So while students are forced to deal with rising tuition costs, power blackouts, dilapidated buildings and an exodus of experienced instructors, outsiders find the introduction of foreign ideas increasingly easy. And the penetration does not stop with academia. In the long term, it is addressed to public policy change, as well.

According to the authorisation file for a now-defunct 1991 linkage contract for Nigeria, the activities were intended to 'further the internationalisation endeavours' of the U.S. school by 'increasing access to collaborators in Nigerian universities,' by using the expertise of Nigerian faculty to gain 'unique insights' into 'local perceptions,' and by compiling a 'mailing list of university based, research oriented technical experts available for use by the ... donor community.' Ultimately, in the words of the official USAID document, the project was intended to 'assure that the research undertaken will be relevant and can be translated into programmes and policies.'

Education, as the Senegalese novelist Hamidou Kane has proclaimed, is more forceful than the gun. Because it has the potential to permanently instill new ways of thinking, it is schooling that makes conquest complete. 'The cannon compels the body, but the school bewitches the soul.'

Indeed, if measures are not taken quickly to reverse the trend toward a western monopoly on learning, the woman in Amman may be literally correct to say that those with the least schooling are best educated.

Distributed by wire from London to
subscribers in Asia and Africa.
Reprinted with author's permission.