The Vocational UWC Model and the Mwalimu Nyerere UWC for Self-RelianceA Presentation for the 14^th UWC International Council
Singapore , 6-8 October 2005  

By Paul Bjerk
(UWC-USA, 1991)

 Good afternoon.  It is a great privilege to be here as a part of this group to talk about vocational education in the UWC.   I’m going to talk about three things today

1-How I got involved in this project

2-The relevance of Julius Nyerere’s ideas for vocational education in the UWC

3-The relevance of vocational education for the UWC movement as a whole

After I graduated from the UWC in New Mexico I spent a few months at FUNDACEA living as a student.  While I experienced severe culture shock, like most IB students who wind up down there, and I got stung by bees while chasing a stray bull, and was dive bombed by a bat in my dorm room—I still grew to appreciate the work that the school was doing, from its serious business of growing it own food to the relationships of sharing and service it has built in local communities.  I wrote an article for the UWC-USA newsletter about FUNDACEA that concluded

 If nothing else, it connects the movement with the real-life, fundamental development problems of the developing world.  It connects the movement with an institution not geared toward the elite of each country.  It makes the movement something more than just a collection of idealistic, high-powered international prep-schools…While international relations may work from the top down, healthy domestic political and economic development works from the bottom up.  Both sides of this equation are needed to create global peace and understanding.

This is even more true today.  All sorts of political scientists talk about how poverty, underdevelopment and social marginalization cause political instability and war.  This is an especially prominent theme in Africa .  

One organization which has been working to confront and resolve the complicated challenges facing Africa today is the Mwalimu Nyerere Foundation.  Julius Nyerere, known by Tanzanians as Mwalimu, meaning ‘teacher’, established the MNF in 1996 to promote his ideas and legacy.  Nyerere was one of the most admired leaders of the independence period in Africa , and widely known in the developing world for his innovative thinking.  I’m even told that, for good or for bad, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has been citing Nyerere in some recent speeches.  

After spending three years in Tanzania teaching at a small university, and learning about Nyerere’s importance, I decided to do a PhD in African history to study his presidency.  In 2003 I got an internship with the MNF.  Executive Director, Joseph Butiku and his staff were supportive of my project.  There I came to appreciate the vision of this organization.  The MNF aims to be a center for conflict resolution, a tribute to Mwalimu Nyerere, and a think tank seeking African solutions to Africa ’s problems.  I also came to appreciate the great challenges of trying to fund, manage, and staff this sort of organization in a country as poor as Tanzania .  

Part of the challenge is that there is just so much to do.  No one is more aware of this than Nimrod Mkono , a lawyer and parliament member, and MNF trustee who I met in the course of my work there. Mwalimu Nyerere left Mr. Butiku the task of overseeing the MNF and Mr. Mkono with the task of developing educational institutions in their home area just to the east of Lake Victoria .  Nyerere, characteristically, had not used his political influence to develop his home area.   

Mr. Mkono showed me his plans for an agricultural university named for Nyerere, and his vision seemed similar to what I had seen at FUNDACEA.  As I re-read Nyerere’s essay “Education for Self-Reliance” I realized just how close Nyerere’s ideas were to those of Dr. Marcano Coello of FUNDACEA.  In fact, when we finally did meet Dr. Marcano in Venezuela last year he said, “When I read it, I thought, I wrote this myself.  Except he did it twelve years before me!”  So after our visit to Venezuela and a visit by Luis Marcano Gonzalez to Tanzania , we are proposing the construction of the Mwalimu Nyerere United World College for Self-Reliance.

Nyerere sought to steer Tanzania ’s educational system away from serving the administrative needs of a colonial service to the “development of a proud, independent, and free citizenry which relies upon itself for its own development, and which knows the advantages and the problems of cooperation.”  A primary concern arose from the structure of Tanzanian education which was modeled, like the UWC, on the British boarding school system. “Tanzania’s education is such as to divorce its participants from the society it is supposed to be preparing them for…[The student] will be more at home in the world of the educated than he is among his own parents.”  To counter this Nyerere proposed that  

teachers, workers, and pupils together must be the members of a social unit in the same way as parents, relatives, and children are in the family social unit…This is not a suggestion that a school farm or workshop should be attached to every school for training purposes.  It is a suggestion that every school should also be a farm…Neither does this concept of schools contributing to their own upkeep simply mean using our children as labourers who follow traditional methods.  On the contrary, on a school farm pupils can learn by doing.

While agricultural skills are central to enhancing rural lives, they are also the means of deeper lessons and values.  In Nyerere’s vision, Education for Self-Reliance bound the individual self to community—making a bridge between what appear as polar opposites. A number of modern historians have shown that local modes of social organization and agricultural practice were well-attuned to environmental and economic pressures, and that often times colonial interventions disrupted these systems weakening those communities and people’s health.  Nyerere observed:  

Our farmers have been on the land for a long time.  The methods they use are the result of long experience in the struggle with nature; even the rules and taboos they honour have a basis in reason.  It is not enough to abuse a traditional farmer as old-fashioned; we must try to understand.

A UWC built in Tanzania drawing on Mwalimu Nyerere’s philosophy should create strong ties with the local community and draw on that community’s knowledge and experience as an integral part of its curriculum.  It would then be infused with an ‘on the ground’ reality that would be its primary contribution to the UWC movement.  

This ‘on the ground’ reality is crucial to the UWC movement.  I remember, before the talk with Mr. Mkono, I had a conversation with Mr. Butiku where my time at UWC came up.  He asked me, “but is it just focused on elites?”  I said yes, and then tried to tell him a little about the Venezuelan school.  But it is a good question.   

Without a doubt, as Jannes Ritskes pointed out so clearly yesterday, the UWC mission is elitist.  Its unstated intention is to train future leaders, planting them like seeds among future elites to cultivate peace.  It is a worthwhile undertaking.  But it is incomplete.  It is vulnerable to some of the same weaknesses that Nyerere outlined for the Tanzanian education system.  I suppose the UWC program is meant to divorce its students from their normal backgrounds with the intention that they open up their minds and become someone new during their two years.  Like all schools they are socializing institutions.  The same is true for the vocational model.  The reason we need both models in the movement is so that the transformation that takes place is not solely oriented towards the highly educated elite that is increasingly a global social class of its own.   

Such vision can easily grow to be just as myopic as the parochial local views that the UWC tries to upset.  It is easy for people working at the World Bank or the UN or Washington DC or just about any capital city to lose touch with the realities of life in their own countries.  After an experience at a place like UWC and a university education it easy for graduates to find they have more in common with other UWC types from many different countries than parents and friends back home—especially if they come from rural backgrounds.   

The presence of the vocational colleges in the UWC movement counters that trend.  With their local focus, they are institutionally connected to community realities in their area in a way the academic colleges can ever be.  Nyerere’s vision deepens our understanding of how a vocational agricultural school offers lessons that go far beyond the technical skills that they teach. Mastery of those technical skills are part and parcel—they are the means—of the educational purpose.  Just as the challenges of physical activity, wilderness experience, and service were fundamental to Kurt Hahn’s educational model, Nyerere argued that:  

However much agriculture a young person learns, he will not find a book which will give him all the answers to all the detailed problems he will come across on his own farm.  He will have to learn the basic principles of modern knowledge in agriculture and then adapt them to solve his own problems.  Similarly, the free citizens of Tanzania will have to judge social issues for themselves; there neither is, nor will be, a political 'holy book' which purports to give all the answers to all the social, political and economic problems which will face our country in the future...Only free people conscious of their worth and their equality can build a free society.

The FUNDACEA model provides an ideal framework for incorporating Nyerere’s ideas into the UWC movement.  But they should not be the same.  Drawing on different cultural contexts and different economic realities they will inevitably develop slightly different approaches.  Instead they offer the chance to see more clearly the educational purpose that lies at the heart of the vocational model.    

So, with the addition of more vocational colleges to the UWC movement, I foresee some convergence of these models.  Nyerere’s ideas, and the ideas that emerge from the close involvement of the vocational colleges in their communities, will contribute to the maturing vision of the UWC movement.  The integrated presence of rural communities will make the movement’s goal of fostering “peace and justice, understanding and cooperation” in the world more realistic.

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