Education and National Development in Western Samoa

Abstract

The role of education in economic, political and social change has in recent years become a prominent feature of discussions about development in emergent countries and an increasing number of these nations have tended to develop their education systems within a concentrated policy of satisfying a projected or estimated demand from both government and the private sector for highly qualified manpower. Economists rather than educationists have drawn attention to the importance of fully utilizing human resources to promote economic development and they have attempted, using a variety of ever more sophisticated techniques, to quantify the contribution "investment in human capital" can make to economic growth. This approach has undoubtedly led to a more vigorous and precise evaluation of many aspects of the interaction between the economy and educational systems, and has in this way made a major contribution to educational planning in both developed and underdeveloped countries. However the tendency of some economists to express the problems of human education and development solely in terms of the accumulation of human capital and its effective investment in the development of an economy has been questioned by several writers, among them Mary Jean Bowman and C.E. Beeby, not because the economist's approach lacks validity, but rather because the methods they employ sometimes overlook or disregard the socio-historical context in which educational and economic development take place. The value of examining the educational development of a country within a detailed historical and sociological framework is illustrated in a recent study of education and social change in Ghana by Philip Foster, who looks at education, together with economic, social and political growth in a complex process of interaction, each part fully understood only on its relation to the whole.