This dissertation focuses on the politics of negotiating different interests and ideological agendas around the time of educational policy formulation for British Africa generally and for the Gold Coast colony specifically.
As the British colonial administration systematized its control in its colonies, missionaries, who had been the dominant operators of schools in Africa, faced the need to protect the place of religious education at school. At the same time, Africans pressured for a higher education that did not necessarily accord with the interests of Europeans. For the colonial administrators, education was a part of social service which justified their presence in Africa. While they were anxious about bringing up more nationalists by widening the access to higher education, they wished to control access to an elite group likely to be loyal to the British Empire. The dissertation describes the unfolding power struggle in the metropole and on the Gold Coast in the process of defining the goals, forms, and contents of "education for Africans". It also reexamines the role of American philanthropists, who are reputed to have greatly influenced on the British education policy in Africa by promoting a vocationally-oriented form of education for the American black (black industrial education).
The study illustrates the flourishing educational philosophies in Europe and America that were drawn upon by colonial powers to rationalize their overseas educational policies. Progressive educationists considered school as a site of developing social transformers. For the promoters of American black industrial education, school was an agency to make the black youth conform to the existing social structure. British Public School educators emphasized "character training" of students through various school activities. These were all quite different in their perceived goals of education, but converged in their stress on moral education and adaptation to the students' background. The discourse on Achimota School, which was established by the colonial administration as the model of "adapted" education, demonstrates the process of melding different philosophical sources into a semblance of a coherent educational philosophy. In this process of negotiation, Achimota became a battleground for Africans and Europeans with different political interests in education.
