There’s a fantastic piece in today’s Times about the sad, sorry state of universities in Africa, and particularly, Senegal:
Africa’s best universities, the grand institutions that educated a revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions.
The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of nations of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty.
Having attended one such African university, the Université Gaston Berger, which was repeatedly touted as the “best in West Africa,” I can attest to the fact that the conditions are not great. We didn’t have the same overcrowding problems that Lydia Polgreen reports are going on at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, although there were reports of a shortage of rooms. That said, there’s terrible mismanagement, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t have a roommate (remember I said there were room shortages) for the bulk of the year — in a room designed for two.
But I think one aspect that the article doesn’t articulate at all is the fact that African universities, from my experience, doesn’t facilitate critical thinking at all. All of my classes were taught by rote — the professor would lecture, and we’d copy, verbatim, what he said. The exam? An oral exam where we’d have to basically spit back what he’d said. I still have no idea what my grades were from my Senegal days. There was no discussion, no dialogue, no real learning of any kind.
I still can’t tell you one bit of information I recall that I got in a Senegalese lecture hall — but I learned a heckuva lot while being there.
