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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Education in Eritrea in the 1940s: British alternatives to Italian constraints and the new initiatives at grassroots level
| Panel |
18. Education and Social change in Eastern and Southern Africa
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| Paper ID | 665 |
| Author(s) |
Guazzini, Federica
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The paper will explore how the sudden collapse of Italian colonial rule in Eritrea in 1941 opened up a new phase in the history of the country marked by the expanding educational opportunities for Eritreans.
Focusing how the British initiatives were mainstreamed into the classical colonial paradigm and driven by the imperative of exporting European knowledge, the paper will examine the many constraints that characterized the British policy and the different educational issues and challenges it determined. The goals of this education reform will be illustrated, assessing how the immediate local people’s demand for education were met. This case-study demonstrates the creative and skilful appropriation of the emergent rooms of manoeuvre at a grassroots level, analysing this broad range of initiatives and the interplay of competing versions of modernity and discussing the perceptions and potential for openness or closure at the local and regional level.
The paper will aim to explain the impact on the social processes of knowledge acquisition and transmission in both European and local languages, as well as the new conditions of access and teaching in missionary and colonial schools and within different groups of population: urban and rural, Muslims and Christians. Lastly, I will turn to question what were the links created between these new standards of school education in the context of abrupt changing economic and political landscape.
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