Let Them Get Learning
The Promise of Education, 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 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 institutions and lives in Nairobi and neighbouring Kiambu County. The study is organised around successive reworkings of what education would achieve for the people of Kenya.
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 reworking is explored synchronically, reconstructing the configuration of actors, institutions and relationships that produced it, while the promise is also followed diachronically, tracing how unrealised ambitions, retained practices, raised expectations and institutional legacies accumulated over time. Crucially, it situates concrete interventions — commissions, plans, expert missions, funding decisions — within the wider promise they served and reshaped, holding the particular reform and the overarching trend in a single frame. The study is sensitive to dreams and ambition and looks back unironically.
Reworkings of the promise of education
Across the period, the promise was repeatedly remade as Kenya's relationships with the wider world changed and as new understandings emerged of what education should achieve. The study follows these successive reworkings.
Colonial education and the developmental subject
The educational settlement codified by the Beecher Report of 1949 and the developmental subject it imagined.
Mau Mau, re-education and international scrutiny
The civilising promise enforced under Emergency conditions, and monitored transnationally.
African agendas and national reforms
The Africanising promise as independence reshaped national education.
Harambee and its transnational sponsorship
Self-help schooling and the outside actors who sponsored it.
Productivity, manpower and education for the economy
The productivist promise: schooling recast as economic input.
The university between national service and intellectual freedom
Higher education caught between developmental demand and academic autonomy.
Related public writing
The research connects directly to present-day debate. 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.