Title: Traditional Institutions and Traditional Elites: The Role of Education in the Ethiopian Body-Politic
Abstract: A radical change in an educational system, as well as being the result of a social revolution, is a means of consolidating it. In a developing nation like Ethiopia which is undergoing a social upheaval, education has a vital role to play. It permits the articulation of the aspirations of the masses as a subject fit for knowledge. It helps to associate knowledge with the critique of the oppressive conditions of life and commits it to the transformation of society and the development of human potentialities. It is a truism that education, as a conveyer belt of human values, skills, ideas, and facts, is an integral aspect of a society's reproduction of itself. The conflicts and tensions that germinate in a given society, the solutions, both functional and dysfunctional, that the political system generates to resolve them find their way into the educational system and condition its structure and content. The educational system and the education imparted therein could even be in certain situations, the expression, indeed the embodiment of one of society's tensions, and as such, is transformed into a catalyst-if not of social change, at least of social awareness that leads to the development of an action oriented ideology. The study presented here will attempt to elaborate on these different aspects of education through an empirical investigation of the relationship between traditional education and socio-political processes in Ethiopia in the course of this millenium.1 Traditionally, education was dispensed by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,2 which introduced the young Ethiopian to the Ge'ez and Ethiopian alphabets3 and to reading the Old and New Testaments in Ge'ez.4 A distinction was made between reading and writing. The youngster was taught how to read the sacred texts, but no emphasis was put on teaching him how to write. This produced two kinds of educated people: those who could read and those who could both read and
Publication Year: 1976
Publication Date: 1976-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 21
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