Let Them Get Learning?
The Promise of Education in Kenya and the World, 1945–1980
Geneva Graduate Institute, Department of International History and Politics.
This study investigates the promise of education as a transnationally influenced, continuously redefined series of possibilities for young Kenyans between 1945 and 1980.
It considers how different futures were proffered through education from colonialism to independence and a new era of global governance, with a particular focus on how relationships with the wider world reshaped the promise and its effects on individuals and society. It follows four overlapping configurations of that promise and argues that education worked as a means of governing the young: a pattern evident across the decolonising global South, of which Kenya is the illustration.
The central question
How did Kenya's transnational relationships repeatedly redefine the promise of education for development between 1945 and 1980, and with what consequences?
Research framework
The research is organised around a framework devised for this project. It treats the promise of education as a dispositif, in Michel Foucault's sense: a heterogeneous ensemble of ideas, institutions, policies, plans, material forms and practices that cohered around a shared conviction that education would deliver development, and with it a better future. Each configuration is explored synchronically, reconstructing the actors, institutions and relationships that produced it, and diachronically, following how practices, expectations and political consequences accumulated over time. The framework situates concrete interventions — commissions, plans, expert missions, funding decisions — within the wider promise they served. Read this way, education emerges as a means of governing the young: it secured their consent through the prospect of advancement, while its most consequential failures were political — the instability that followed when advancement did not materialise.
Four configurations of the promise
The study reconstructs four configurations of the promise as Kenya's ties to the wider world shifted.
Late colonial education: the developmental subject and the disloyal
The educational settlement codified by the Beecher Report of 1949 and its coercive defence during the Mau Mau Emergency, when re-education in the detention camps drew international scrutiny.
Africanisation and harambee
Independence recast education as a national and Pan-African project, pursued with UNESCO and across the continent and, where the state fell short, taken up through the community self-help of harambee.
Productivity, manpower and education for the economy
Schooling recast as economic input through manpower planning, and the school-leaver crisis that followed. ‘Let them get earning?’
The university, the graduate and emigration
Higher education, the graduate the state both needed and feared, and the emigration — particularly to Britain — that acted as the promise's safety valve.
Why it matters now
The conviction that education delivers opportunity still drives policy across the global South, now for the largest generation of young people in history. In much of Africa, schooling and higher education are not leading to the (implicitly or explicitly) promised futures of rewarding job opportuinities and secure livelihoods, and the frustration of educated young people has become a political force — from Kenya's protests since 2024 to movements across the region. What is now a crisis of the present has echoes in a generations-old pattern whose origins are traced by this study.
Related public writing
The research connects directly to present-day debates. See "From unequal foundations to a shared post-2030 future for education?" (UNESCO Futures of Education IdeasLAB, 2026) and the conversations in The Reform Cycle.