13. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE INSTITUTION
There was at the time of African independence a great faith in the virtues of the western education system. Africans saw that the Westerners were rich and possessed lots of desirable techniques and goods. It was somehow assumed that the key to acquiring the knowledge of the Westerner was to adopt their school and university system. Or rather, the African administrators and politicians who took over from the colonial authorities accepted the model of school system which they inherited with very little questioning. Even in Tanzania the changes made were superficial. The question they failed to raise was: How far is the western technological culture passed on by the school system? When you decide to introduce knowledge into a community it would be good to discover the best means of transmitting it.

It is quite possible that the rôle of the schools in transmitting the technological culture is a good deal smaller than many people, especially teachers, like to think. Or at least, there are many other modes of transmission. Children tinker with bicycles, watch their fathers repair cars, play with mechanical toys, such as Meccano. All these are ways of becoming familiar with the bases of western technological culture, many of which are seldom spoken about. The idea of cause and effect, which is not necessarily shared with other cultures, or not in the same form, is so ingrained in our culture, in the air as it were, that it is picked up unconsciously by almost everyone in our culture, even if they never practice engineering or the obvious cultural formulations of the idea.

The schools which were set up in anglophone Africa usually copied the British schools in almost every respect. That is, the methods of organisation and the syllabus were very similar. The academic exams were based on the British models.

But there was a lot missing. Once in Kenya (before the English Block started) I offered a prize to the students to build a solar concentrator. The conditions were that an individual or group had to build a device which would boil a litre of water in 30 minutes beginning with water at room temperature. They were to use only solar energy. I made available books which described the process, though I didn't explicitly tell them to read them. In the school there were students studying A-level sciences.

One student did win the prize with a device about one and a half metres in diameter built of cardboard and aluminium foil. Before submitting it he tested it. It didn't quite work. He saw that it wasn't quite big enough and added an extra area of reflector. It then worked. He showed scientific thought by being able to work out both how it worked and why it needed alteration. The point of this is that he was exceptional. (Later he died, said to have been poisoned perhaps by relatives, perhaps, one might speculate, because he was exceptional.) The other entrants showed that they thought science was a matter of magic or cookery. One group brought in a car headlight reflector. They had learned that the solution had something to do with parabolas and that the headlamp contained a parabolic reflector. This presumably shows the sign of more knowledge than zero, but they had no idea of the importance of quantity. They brought in their entry for the competition, set it up and left it in the sun for half an hour. At the end of this time the water was as warm as it would have been without any concentration. In fact they had not put it at the focus, nor had they used a litre. Presumably they had not tested the device before bringing it to the competition. I believe that their entry, which was representative of the attitude of the student body (A-level science students, following a course like a British one), was the result of not having had the kind of experience of everyday technology which almost every young person in a western society has.