Education, poverty and development – mapping their interconnections

Abstract

Human capital and functionalist paradigms underpin the stance taken by most governments to education policy. These models have also had a profound effect upon the determination of education priorities in the poorest states and, indeed, upon aid policy. This paper argues, on the basis of evidence from the papers in this volume and from the wider research literature, that the outcomes of education for individuals and for society depend more upon national and local contexts, on history and on culture, than such models typically allow.

Notes

The papers in this volume were produced under the auspices of the Research Consortium on Education Outcomes and Poverty (RECOUP), a partnership of seven institutions in the UK, Africa and South Asia, led by the University of Cambridge. RECOUP's research examines the impact of education on the lives and livelihoods of people in developing countries, particularly those living in poorer areas and from poorer households. It has been funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Neither DFID nor any of the partner institutions are responsible for the opinions expressed in the papers in this volume, nor for any errors they may contain. Information about RECOUP and its outputs can be found at: http://recoup.educ.cam.ac.uk.

Adam Smith [(1776) 1991, Ch X, Pt. 1, 90–91]; J.S. Mill [(1848) 1965, Bk 1, Ch. 7, Sect. 5, 107]. More recently Alfred Marshall [(1920) 1961, 564] observed that ‘the most valuable of all capital is that which is invested in human beings’.

The erstwhile chairman of the IEA, Austin Robinson, observed in his introduction to the conference volume that ‘the conference did much to fortify one's already existing belief that any country would be gravely mistaken if it regarded education as primarily a form of consumption: as a desirable form of welfare expenditure permissible to a rich country and an extravagance to a poor country … to be expanded only if things go well and to be retrenched if things go badly’ (Robinson 1966, xvii).

Thinking particularly of work on education, Kelly and Altbach (1986, 90) claim that even as late as 1977, structural functionalism was still the ‘major theoretical premise undergirding scholarship’.

An early authoritative review of the evidence and arguments is Cochrane (1979).

An economic investigation of the ways in which education can be part of a poverty trap is undertaken by a different part of RECOUP research which provides empirical support – otherwise rather lacking in the literature – for the role of education both in the persistence of, and as providing a potential escape from, poverty (Knight, Shi and Quheng 2009, 2010).

This interpretation has been contested by some analysts working in the Marxist tradition, who argue that it is the non-cognitive traits given by schooling which employers value (Bowles and Gintis 1976). Human capital theory, however, is silent about the underlying reasons for education being valued by employers. The possibility that the more schooled are more valuable to them (i.e. more productive) because of the non-cognitive rather than the cognitive traits it promotes does not therefore directly undermine its theoretical premises.

This greater selectivity, however, is not strongly influenced by objective indicators of ‘need’. The poverty orientation of aid appears to be slightly stronger than its selectivity towards those countries with ‘better’ policies (Thiele, Nunnenkamp and Dreher 2006) but, in general, the direction of aid appears to be dictated as much by political and strategic considerations as by the economic needs or the policy framework of its recipients (Alesina and Dollar 2000). This is true also of the allocation of aid to education (Colclough 2011).

The ‘Statement of Resolve’, for example, emphasises the need for: ‘increasing [donor] alignment of aid with partner countries’ priorities, systems and procedures and helping to strengthen their capacities' (OECD/DAC 2005, 1).