This chapter is written by an author without academic credentials in philosophy; his main

qualification is a felt-need to contribute to a philosophical basis for education in Africa. As

such, the chapter does not pretend to address any specific domain of philosophy; instead it
attempts to chart a crude conceptual lens for philosophical thinking on African education. It
floats the idea that African scholars in general and philosophers in particular need not always
take their cue from elsewhere but from their African roots, albeit with keen awareness that
they belong to an international community of scholars (Bodunrin, 1985). That is, the search
for and development of an appropriate philosophy of education in Africa must occur within
the framework of global trends and traditions in academic philosophy of education. Africa
must live up to the global age signals that all cultures can contribute scientific knowledge of
universal value (UNESCO, 1999). PHILOSOPHY AND WORLDVIEWS Human intentions
and understanding are organized in the light of cherished goals, values, and pictures of the
world (Berlin, 1976, p. 195). A concept that encapsulates such meaning-making is worldview
or theory of the universe. Worldview is a cultural frame of reference to the universe that
includes a psychological outlook regarding the place and role of the human being in general
and the child in particular. In a nutshell, a theocentric theory positions the family, ancestry
and a supreme being in existential and metaphysical hierarchy. An African theory
acknowledges everyone’s humanity, imputes spirituality into human life, and situates the
child not in his or her sovereignty but as socially grounded in the extended family
(Nsamenang, 2008). Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning
such matters as human existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, language, truth, and the
nature of the child, the purpose of education, and much more. Philosophy advances
disciplined rational arguments in search of meaning and understanding of problems and
concerns. From the origin of humanity the search for meaning, purpose and human
understanding has been central to human existence. As such, philosophy can be seen as a
conceptual anchor of human culture and civilization, even if Africa’s philosophy is only
partially charted. To philosophize is to make meaning of human existence in terms of
searching for answers to some fundamental questions and issues, such as the purpose of life
and how offspring fit into that meaning. Most, if not all, academic disciplines and professions
begin with a philosophy. Thus, philosophic ideas or distinct mindsets shape academic and
service disciplines like education and medicine, among others. If indeed a theorist’s view of
development is closely tied to his or her view of human nature, a view intimately tied to his
or her conception of how the universe works (Nsamenang, 1992, p. 210), then, we ought to
organize education within Africa’s theory of the universe. Chapter 4 - Toward a Philosophy
for Africa’s Education 58 PHILOSOPHIC IDEAS UNDERLINE EDUCATIONAL
SYSTEMS Education is a fundamental problem for which every culture has engaged its
educational ideas and efforts to equip its offspring with knowledge, skills, and the modus
operandi that are needed to mature individuals, improve personal and collective well-being
and conserve cultural heritage. In other words, every human society throughout history has
educated its offspring within a particular philosophic vision of the child and his or her
development and the future toward which that child should mature. All systems of education
are systematic processes organized to mature and induct children into their culture’s most
cherished social status – adulthood. In this sense, the goal to fit children into a globalizing
world is secondary. Cultures do not visualize the same endpoints of development; “various
cultures … recognize, define and assign different developmental tasks to the same biological
agenda” (Nsamenang, 1992, p. 144). Whiting and Whiting (1975) heightened the value of
culture by proffering it as a provider of settings for educating children. Therefore,
worldviews and their educational curricula ought to be central to philosophy of education.
African culture is particularly central to educational efforts in that education is framed within
African family traditions which accredit parents and children as partners in the educational
process. If philosophy of education “is to be authentic, its distinctive concerns must arise out
of issues thrown up by firsthand experience of life itself ” in African societies (Mason, 1985,
p. 105). Without roots in African experiences and livelihoods, philosophy of education would
be reduced to “intellectual gymnastics” (Mason, 1985, p. 105). Intellectual honesty demands
acknowledgement that philosophical dispositions to education preoccupied all racial and
cultural groups for centuries prior to the development of the Greco-Western philosophies that
now dominate all other philosophical outlooks. That is, Western philosophy of education is
but one of several philosophical mindsets in educational thinking of which Africa’s
educational ideas is a subset. Therefore, Africa must endeavor to outgrow the Greco-Western
philosophies to evolve a philosophy on which to embed its education. Consequently, the main
thrust of this chapter is to ignite an active search in student teachers, their trainers, African
education scholars, and interested parties to explore and document Africa’s educational ideas
and practices, particularly those of students’ and scholars’ societies and countries, as
foundational content for an appropriate philosophy of education. The chapter charts the broad
features of concerns on which searchers of Philosophy for Africa’s education may reflect.
African philosophy of education is not an imperative that will remain unachievable until we
have experts trained in technical philosophy and educational sciences (Njoroge and Bennaars,
1986). Student teachers, teachers and scholars can extract its elements from oral sources and
African practices with systematic context-sensitive strategies. Africa’s longest experience
with the education of offspring, as the birthplace of humanity, implicated and still Handbook
of African Educational Theories and Practices: A Generative Teacher Education Curriculum
59 implicates a “philosophical attitude” about life, the universe, and how best to induct
children into the canonical ways of society, even if that “philosophy” is oral and uncharted.
While a key Western philosopher, Socrates, is known to us entirely for oral arguments
imputed to him by his student Plato, Western philosophical traditions have developed
increasingly as ones which pay careful attention to written arguments. It is crucial to note that
substantive arguments in ethics and politics, metaphysics and epistemology, aesthetics and
other major subdivisions of philosophy across cultures have been little written about outside
of the broad traditions of Western philosophy. REFLECTIONS THAT COULD FRAME
EVOLUTION OF A PHILOSOPHY FOR AFRICAN EDUCATION The methods of
philosophy that have developed in the West through “progressive” analyses of texts are not
found everywhere (www.rep.routledge.com/ article/Z018, 2010), but we can find the major
questions that have preoccupied Western philosophies in oral traditions and tacit in the
practices of every culture around the globe. These concerns constitute the primary sources,
regardless of positive or negative judgmental values Western scholarship has imputed on
them, from which philosophic ideas and practices of education should be extracted. Of
course, they should complement those that have developed and are developing since the
introduction of Western training in academic philosophy and professional education (Kariuki,
2009). “African philosophy” also exists in Africa’s political philosophers, for example,
Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold S. Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela (see Brown and
Shumba, Chapter 35, this Volume) and academic philosophers like Kwasi Wiredu, Godfrey
Tangwa, among other African academic philosophers. Admittedly, Africa has knowledge
and, logically, power and scholars. But these differ from the Euro-American in one major
respect: ever since the early 19th century when the Euro-American presence in Africa began
to be noticeably felt in the interior, Africa’s knowledge has increasingly ceased to be rooted
in the African soil (Ojiaku, 1974, p. 204). African knowledge has increasingly become
foreign because conclusions on African scholarship “are significantly influenced by …
Western societal beliefs, value systems and ideological perspectives” (Ojiaku, 1974, p. 209).
The rest of this section identifies statements and questions that can rouse reflections on
sources of philosophic ideas and methods of philosophical discourse that are not only
germane to and meaningful within African knowledge systems but that could guide a
systematic approach to articulating a relevantly coherent African philosophical statement on
education. Omoregbe (1985, pp. 6-7) believes that the fact that the philosophical reflections
of African thinkers in the past were not preserved or transmitted by writing accounts for the
fact that these philosophers remain unknown to us. But this does not mean Chapter 4 -
Toward a Philosophy for Africa’s Education 60 that they did not exist, for we have evidence
of their philosophical reflections preserved and transmitted through channels other than
writing such as mythologies, wise-sayings, proverbs, folktales, and religious ideas and
practices (see Chapter 5, this volume). It is thus un-philosophical and simplistic for a
philosopher to claim a priori that certain kinds of things do not, as a matter of fact, exist
(Bodunrin, 1985). Whether a thing exists or does not exist is a matter of fact; it is not a
philosophical problem. Philosophers have no special privilege to tell what is and what is not
fact; the question of what is to count as philosophy is itself a philosophical question. What
philosophy one does emanates from an understanding of what philosophy is. A hallmark of
philosophy is to take a position, then justify and defend it with rational arguments. In so
doing, one must realize that a consensus may never emerge in debates about an African
philosophy of education because consensus hardly ever occurs in philosophical debates
(Bodunrin, 1985, p. xiii). In addition, rights-based thinking and scientific fairness do not
permit African philosophical ideas to be suppressed by classical western philosophical
thinking, as we seem to have acquiesced to its misguided supremacy. Although writing is the
most effective record-keeping system, it is not the only means of transmitting knowledge
across generations. Apart from mythologies, wise sayings, worldviews, knowledge can be
preserved in the socio-political set-up of the people and cultural tools, especially those
associated with childbearing and childrearing. These are only some channels through which
reflections and views of African philosophers have been preserved and transmitted and can
be exploited for an African philosophy of education. The individual original authors of the
ideas remain unknown to us, however. Yet, we know that these ideas must have been the
products of deep and sustained philosophic reflections by some individual African thinkers in
the remote past. ON DEVELOPING A PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION FOR A HYBRID
AFRICA Today’s challenge is to find out the reasoning behind the ideas and practices
Africa’s great minds have bequeathed to posterity. This is as much a challenge to the African
teacher trainee as it is to the African teacher trainer, scholar and his or her education
cooperation partner. Efforts to tackle this challenge would realize the inadequacy or
insensitivity of current philosophical orientations as comprehensive mindsets with which to
understand the African philosophic thinking. This is partly due to the fact that a great deal of
the African social thought and knowledge are locked in maxims, proverbs and folklore, not
easily translatable into European languages except at the cost of impairment to their essence,
or distortion of their full meaning (Ojiaku, 1974, p. 211). This point, among others, compels
not only innovative context-sensitive theorization and methodological creativity but also
development of a Philosophy for African education that explicitly incorporates African
epistemologies and pedagogies. Africa’s hybrid cultural character of Handbook of African
Educational Theories and Practices: A Generative Teacher Education Curriculum 61
coexisting strands of Islamic-Arabic philosophical ideas and varied Western-Christian
philosophical orientations further obscures the African education field. The coexistence of
philosophical ideas and values from three significant heritages itched Africa into gradual
atrophy of its indigenous political and institutional structures and value systems. Greek
philosophers observed that the universe combined unity with diversity and continuity with
changes (Omoregbe, 1985); so do African philosophers and education scholars. We can adopt
a blended approach to build a viable philosophy (Bodunrin, 1985, p. xi) from the continent’s
“bewildering diversity and extraordinary dynamism” (Olaniyan, 1982, p. 1). This
reconstructive framework should seek to determine which aspects of African philosophic
ideas and the practices they enlighten can mesh with relevant Western philosophic
orientations to constitute the foundation for preparing Africa’s next generations to navigate
local and global spaces with confidence and educated competences. The certain common
quality (Maquet, 1972, p. 3) perceivable as one traverses Africa’s diverse communities
emerges from one cultural river with numerous tributaries (Asante and Asante, 1990, pp. ix-
x), common political and social institutions with only slight variations (Nkwi, 1983, p. 102)
and beliefs in ancestry, the existence of a supreme being and the value of the extended family
(Mphahlele in Mwamwenda, 1996, p.421). The role of oral traditions and a communitarian
approach to the education of children in participative pedagogies are also common features
throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Education in African family traditions prompted children to
self-care and to reflect on their own life conditions and take responsibility to improve them.
Most African parents encouraged children to become independent at a much early age and
this independence is fostered and enforced by letting a child do even difficult things on his or
her own (Munday, 1979, p. 165). Children are rights-bearers who can contribute to their
development and society. In fact, the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child requires
children’s participation to promote their own survival and development. Yet, international
advocacy stigmatizes the participative agency of Africa’s children as child labor!
FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLES FOR AN AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
Whereas the foundational concepts of Western education are educare and educere (see
Baguma and Aheisbwe, Chapter 2, this volume), the driving force of African learning
processes is emergence (Nsamenang, 2004). The Western school is a primary learning site,
organized to keep children away from adult settings; it primes into mature roles by giving
them nonproductive tasks distant from their livelihood realities (Rogoff, 2003). It construes
children as “reproducers, to be filled with knowledge and values and made ‘ready to learn’
and ‘ready for school’ …” (Moss and Petrie, 2002, p. 3). On the other hand, African parents
do not actively “raise” children; parental values create participative spaces that permit
children to emerge or mature by themselves out of one set of developmental tasks into the
next. Accordingly, the Chapter 4 - Toward a Philosophy for Africa’s Education 62
responsibility for children’s learning falls less on parents or other adults and more on the
children themselves emerging or “coming up” gradually and systematically into more mature
statuses as co-participants, first, as novices in peer cultures, and later, as accredited
participants in the social and economic life of the family and community. In this way,
children “graduate” from one role level and participative sphere to another until they
gradually transition into adult roles. Boys and girls poised for adulthood are best evaluated
for social competence and esprit de corps more in the social, moral, intellectual, and practical
matters of peer cultures than other criteria. Development and learning within Western
educational models is believed to depend on “educated” adults as parents, teachers or
practitioners guiding and raising children but less on the action of children themselves,
particularly in the early years. Such children’s restricted access to productive environments
contrasts with the participative learning settings of African children, which highlight
children’s “becoming” (Erny, 1968), “not as a set of organisms to be molded into a pattern of
behavior specified in advance as educational outcomes, but as newcomers to a community of
practice, for whom the desirable outcome of a period of apprenticeship is that they would
appropriate the system of meanings that informs the community’s practices” (Serpell, 2008,
p. 74). Thus, an African philosophy of education should place children’s agency at the centre
of learning processes, as children are active in the business of learning. We should envision a
philosophy of education that permits children and their families as participants in productive
education. If we adopted an African worldview we would visualize a holistic and integrated
way of looking at the family and the universe (Callaghan, 1998, p. 32) and this could inform
us to philosophize and plan education in new ways that are sensitive to African child
development. Pedagogy of sagacity (Njoroge and Bennaars, 1986) is another principle for an
African philosophy of education. Philosophic sagacity was and still is skeptical; it employs
reason to critique the social order and status quo. This principle calls for developing an
African philosophy of education from sage philosophy, which reveals both folk wisdom and
critical personalized philosophical discourse. Odera (1991) believes that there have been and
there will be African sages to inspire authentic roots of an African philosophy (of education).
Pedagogy of sagacity and the pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire, 1972) are interrelated. Paulo
Freire (1972), a Brazilian educationist developed a trend in philosophy of education called
pedagogy of the oppressed. Pedagogy of the oppressed “is an instrument for ... critical
discovery ... of dehumanization” (Freire, 1972, 25) in formal education. Pedagogy in which
the teacher has-knowledge and the learner has-not-knowledge is oppressive. The central
problem of pedagogy of the oppressed is how the oppressed, as divided, unacknowledged and
unappreciated beings, can participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation. This
pedagogy makes oppression and its causes the objects of reflection by the oppressed, and that
reflection is expected to incite their Handbook of African Educational Theories and Practices:
A Generative Teacher Education Curriculum 63 necessary engagement in the struggle for
their own liberation. Freire (1972) employs the analogy of the banking industry to expose
contradictory pedagogical attitudes and practices that mirror the oppressive society as a
whole. The teacher acts as the ‘bank-clerk’ by using banking methods of domination. Such a
teacher mechanically transmits fossilized pre-packaged ideas in terms of curricular content
without critical reflection. Most teachers in African school systems are dogmatic; they fail to
emancipate themselves from dominant oppressive pedagogy of received knowledge which
they deposit on their students. Freire’s (1972) pedagogical paradigm shift replaced the
educational goal of deposit-making with that of posing human problems in interaction with
the world in general and learning materials in particular. We can refer to this as liberating or
generative education which “consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information”
(Freire, 1972, p. 53). Generative education first of all demands a resolution of the teacher-
learner contradiction. Generative processes – indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors
to cognize and cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object or content as the teacher –
are otherwise impossible in banking education (Freire, 1972). A problem-posing teacher
nurtures regeneration of learners as enlightened and emancipated active learners who
demystify deposition-education in celebration of generative education as a transactional and
transformational process that nourishes and empowers both learners and teachers. Generative
education allows freedom for “the critical reflection of both teacher and students” (Freire,
1972, pp. 53-54) and leads to emergence of consciousness, critical intervention in reality, and
new knowledge generation. CONCLUSION Contemporary Africa is heir to a triple
inheritance (Mazrui, 1986) of strands of Islamic-Arabic and Western-Christian educational
philosophies that have been superimposed on Africa’s deep-seated philosophic ideas of
participative education. Although African and Islamic systems of education have operated in
Africa centuries prior to the arrival of Western-Christian education, educational planners on
the continent have degraded them to “submerged systems” and have seldom taken them into
“explicit account in their policies and strategies” (World bank, 1999, p. 1). A philosophy of
education that objectively attends to African historical realities must transcend such myopia
to blend the strengths of each system into a philosophical outlook that fully engages primary
education stakeholders – children and their families. Education in Africa is largely imitative
of Western educational models due to lack of a philosophical anchor, whose articulation is
long overdue. Philosophic ideas exist in various sources of African oral traditions and
practices and yearn for systematic and resourceful articulation into a coherent philosophy.
This chapter calls on African student teachers and their trainers to begin the process of
extracting