Free Education for Africa?

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown want the rich countries to donate $7 billion a year for free
education in Africa. But the BBC sent a team to Africa, reports
James Bartholomew,
author of The Welfare State We’re In,
and found that there’s a vibrant private education system in Africa. In Nigeria it outperforms the
free state education sector.

Prof Tooley organised tests of 3,000 children at a random selection of state
and fee-paying schools in Lagos. In every subject, children at the fee-paying schools did
considerably better. In maths, they scored an average of 56 marks whereas children at the
free state schools got 41. In English
they scored 65 marks whereas children at the free schools got only 42.

Bartholomew reports that “many extremely poor parents in the shanty town of Makoko on the Lagos lagoon in Nigeria make great financial sacrifices to send their children to”
the fee-paying schools. Now why does that sound familiar? Because James Mill, father of John
Stuart Mill, made an inspection of fee-paying schools in England in the early nineteenth century.
Mill “wrote of `the rapid progress which the love of education is making among the
lower orders in England.’ He noted that

There is hardly a village that has not something of a school; and not many children
of either sex who are not taught more or less, reading and writing. We have met with
families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet
for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”

This fee-paying system brought England to almost universal literacy in 1870 when the government
started taking over the schooling of children. Today, according to Bartholomew, functional illiteracy
in Britain in about 20 percent of adults.