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Friday, January 14, 2011

Julius K. Nyerere first President of the United Republic of Tanzania

EXTRACT OF NYERERE'S SPEECH...INTERESTING ARGUMENTS
It is true that in the third world we talk a great deal about economic development, about expanding the number of goods and services and the capacity to produce them, but the goods are needed to serve men, services are required to make the lives of men more useful, more easeful and more fruitful. 

Political, social and economic organization is needed to enlarge the freedom and dignity of men. Always we come back to men, liberated men, as a purpose of activity, the purpose of development. But men can only liberate himself or develop himself. He cannot be liberated or developed by another. For men makes themselves, it is his ability to act deliberately for a self-determined purpose which distinguishes him from other animals. 

The expansion of his own consciousness and therefore of his own power over himself, over his environment and his society must therefore ultimately be what we mean by development. The same is true of education. Its purpose is liberation of man from the strains and limitations of ignorance and dependence. Education has to increase men’s physical and mental freedom. To increase their control over themselves, their own life and their environment in which they live. The ideas imparted by education or released in the minds through education should therefore be liberating idea. The skills acquired by education should be liberating skills. Nothing else can be properly called education. 

Any teaching which induces a slave mentality or a sense of impotence is not education at all. It is an attack on the minds of men. This means adult education has to be directed at helping men to develop themselves. It has to contribute to an enlargement of men’s ability in every way. In particular, it has to help men to decide for themselves in cooperation what development is; it must help men to think clearly, it must enable them to examine the possible alternative causes of action, to make a choice between those alternatives in keeping with their own purposes and it must equip them with the ability to translate their decision in to reality.

The personal and physical aspects of development cannot be separated. It is in the process of deciding for himself what is development and deciding in what direction he should take his society and implementing those decisions, that man develops himself.

There is another aspect to this, a man learns because he wants to do something. And once he has started along this road of developing his capacity, he also learns because he wants to be a more conscious and understanding person. Learning has not liberated a man, if all he learns to want is a certificate on his wall and a reputation of being a learned person, a possessor of knowledge. For such a desire is merely another aspect of the disease of the acquisitive society, the accumulation of goods for the sake of accumulating them. The accumulation of knowledge or worse still the accumulation of pieces of paper which represent a kind of legal tender for such knowledge has nothing to do with development.

Princesslumy  Tanzanian  Model~