Education for Self-Reliance<\/a>.” One of his most provocative arguments is that all secondary schools should contain farms. The claim\u00a0is that\u00a0having schools combined with farms will help\u00a0break down the unhealthy distinctions between “the educated” and manual laborers, and will be educational in a quite holistic sense.<\/p>\nBut look at how Nyerere thinks about the farm\u00a0as a form of governance<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n
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The most important thing is that the school members should learn that it is their farm, and that their living standards depend on it. Pupils should be given an opportunity to make many of the decisions necessary \u2014 for example, whether to spend money they have earned on hiring a tractor to get land ready for planting, or whether to use that money for other purposes on the farm or in the school, and doing the hard work themselves by sheer physical labour. By this sort of practice and by this combination of classroom work and farm work, our educated young people will learn to realize that if they farm well they can eat well and have better faculties in the dormitories, recreation rooms, and so on. If they work badly, then they themselves will suffer. In this process, Government should avoid laying down detailed and rigid rules; each school must have considerable flexibility. Only then can the potential of that particular area be utilized, and only then can the participants practice \u2014 and learn to value \u2014 direct democracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Three\u00a0points here are deeply reminiscent of “New Public Management” managerial techniques.<\/p>\n
1) The government will fund\u00a0schools, but it will not dictate their exact practices: it will instead give schools the “flexibility” to\u00a0allocate their resources in\u00a0whatever way is most effective for their context.<\/p>\n
2) Instead of getting sufficient government funds to cover all its costs, the school’s\u00a0budget\u00a0becomes dependent on its own economic output. Schools are encouraged to sell their spare produce on the open market, and thereby to supplement their regular\u00a0revenues, or to cut costs in buying food for their students.<\/p>\n
3) This integration into\u00a0the economy is also supposed to be a form of self-reward or\u00a0self-punishment. If you are good at your farm, you will\u00a0reap the proceeds. Otherwise, you “suffer.”<\/p>\n
I have no idea whether Nyerere’s school-farms were ever put into practice. His\u00a0paper is a sort of manifesto for socialist education; it doesn’t report on the results of its ideas. (If anyone knows more about what happened on the ground, I would\u00a0appreciate\u00a0tips.) Nevertheless, I find it interesting that these NPM-like governance techniques could (yet again) appear in a\u00a0radically\u00a0non-capitalist context.\u00a0Nyerere’s project had\u00a0standard\u00a0socialist ideals:<\/p>\n
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We have said that we want to create a socialist society which is based on three principles : equality and respect for human dignity ; sharing of the resources which are produced by our efforts ; work by everyone and exploitation by none.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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And indeed, Nyerere’s\u00a0schools were not supposed to\u00a0make students\u00a0compete<\/em> with each other. They weren’t neoliberal in the Harvey free-market-philosophy sense at all. But collective ownership and investment nevertheless seemed to be key to the farming pedagogy that Nyerere envisioned. And if you were bad at collective investment, you got economically punished. I’ll have to think more about why\u00a0Nyerere\u00a0felt this was compatible with his principle of general equality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Neoliberalism” is always an unsatisfying category, but as it does broadly\u00a0designate a cluster of policies and institutional logics, it tends to stick around as an ideal type. David Harvey\u00a0puts it like this: Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[492],"tags":[756,758,757],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2252"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2255,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252\/revisions\/2255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}