than that of relatively cheap primary education? Or should major resources be shifted to expand the quantity and improve the quality of the first nine years of schoolingi including non-formal education for adults?. . . " The dilemma is not an easy one to resolve and different countries will respond differently. In each case, however, the response will be a political one; what is most acceptable; what is most feasible; what is most revolutionary, etc.

His introduction and summary of the major findings in the areas of access, efficiency, equity and relevance is a useful one and his overview of the policy options highlights much of the essential research evidence in these areas. He rightly challenges many of the assumptions about the place of formal education in the development process and calls for some hard thinking about what is meant by "education" and where future investment should be. His final chapter, entitled "Steps Toward Reform" lays down a step by step approach to an analysis of the real needs of a nation's education system, the policy options possible and a two phase introduction of change. The approach is but a sketchy one, and one would like to see this section worked out more thoughtfully and thoroughly in countries which are embarking upon reform in the 1980s.

The bulk of the volume consists of a series of 12 essays on most aspects relating to education in developing countries employment, formal education, access, malnutrition, pre-school education etc. - - neatly divided into Efficiency of Investment in Education, the Impact of Education on Employment, Migration and Fertility and Allocation, Equity and Conflict in Educational Planning. The essays range from Marxist critiques of where things have gone awry in capitalist Third World countries (Carnoy, Bowles) to pithy questioning of some of the assumptions behind education's role in employment (Blaug) ; from pertinent comments on the future of formal education (Dore) to the influence of research of people cf. Jencks in the U.S.A. on thinking and attitudes in the Third World. (Schiefelbein); and from the re-assessment of educational technology (Leslie and Jamieson) to

education's impact on migration and fertility (Todaro).

Several of the essays are heavily biassed towards economics and are none too easy to follow for a non-economist, but generally this is a useful collection of papers which should be of value to students of every age and inclination concerned with educational issues in developing countr ies--whether they are involved in planning, teaching or are simply studying for a higher qualification!

J.K.P. Watson

The Tanzanian Experience: Education for Liberation and Development: ed. H. Hinzen and V. H. Hundsdorfer: UNESCO Institutc of Education, Hamburg and Evans Brother Limited, 1979. 266pp.

That Tanzania is almost without rival in the interest it has attracted for its educational reforms is chiefly due to the writings and speeches of Julius Nyerere, his insights into the short-comings of the inherited system in an independent country with socialist and egalitarian ideals, his understanding of the role of education as a liberating and enabling influence and his captivating style of presentation. This interesting book begins with extensive quotations from these writings as a theoretical background for the changes that have taken place since independence.

There follow chapters of great interest. mainly by Tanzanian scholars, which describe these changes. The editors see these descriptive chaptei's as adding up to an account of 'lifelong education' as an instrument of social change and greater personal fulfilment. The narrative certainly exposes a ferment of educational activity, particularly of a non-formal kind, and faith in the power of education to prepare the minds of people for their part in the transformation of the country on socialist lines.

This part of the narrative, which describes what has been planned and attempted, is a large part of the story, yet it leaves behind an unsatisfied appetite for a more critical testing of assumptions and appraisal of the actual results. This hunger is only partly

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assuaged by three interesting chapters on educational research and one or two other references to research findings. It would, for instance, have been valuable to have a systematic assessment of in-service training for primary school teachers to meet the targets of Universal Primary Education, an experiment of much promise not only in an economic sense, but in its implications for residential training. The consequences of other reforms, such as the abolition of direct university entry, the novel methods of evaluating pupils in secondary schools and the reality to be attached to 'terminal education' in the primary school also deserve closer study. As, however, many of the changes noted were initiated in the early or middle seventies and most of the chapters appear to have been written in 1975, it may well have been too early for systematic analysis.

One shortcoming is the absence of a chapter on educational finance, upon which the prospects of reform critically depend. Most of the contributors also fail to refer to the psychological constraints that can greatly retard the pace of educational change, though the existence of such hindrances do peep through from time to time. As with our own Education Act of 1944, it can take a long time for teachers, students and the public at large to adjust to new educational structures and the ideas and intentions that they are designed to express.

This is, h~wever, a valuable compendium of educational change under the guidance and inspiration of a great leader and teacher.

Roger Carter

H. C. ,4. Somerset. Predicting success in school certificate. East African Studies 31. East African Publishing House. 1968.

Although published twelve years ago this empirical study of the predictive validity of the Ugandan junior secondary leaving examination (JSLE) for success and failure in the Cambridge School Certificate is a useful and rare reminder of what a competent analysis of examination results can reveal. The author examines the correlation between the scores on the JSLE taken in 1960 by 881

pupils (after eight years of elementary schooling) with the same students' scores four years later in 1964 on the Cambridge Overseas School certificate examination (CSC). There was only a moderate relationship between scores on the two examinations.

The analysis does not stop there, however. From the relationships among the different school subjects three distinct intellectual skills were identified, each of which contributed to success in the School certificate examination. These were (i) numerical ability, (ii) the ability to understand and communicate systematic qualitative material and (iii) the ability to use the English language. And through the use of a school quality index the author shows how the scores of students on the" JSLE are determined largely by school quality factors and not by pre-existing differences between students. What is more, these JSLE differences are largely irreversible in the later school career.

The main policy implication drawn by the author is as relevant now for all African countries as it was in the mid-sixties for Uganda. This is the need to redistribute resources from secondary school and university education to elementary schooling to counter the deterimental effects of inferior elementary education. The ill effects of low quality elementary education are not easily ameliorated by high quality and highly expensive secondary schooling later.

The main focus of the book is the efficiency of the selection system. Of lesser concern are the issues of equity and relevance. These concerns although expressed in the book's conclusion, are investigated practically only in later years by the a u t h o r - and then mainly in Kenya. The work in Kenya has resulted in major changes in the nature of the certificate of primary education, changes which attempt to balance the potentially contradictory aims of efficiency, equity and relevance.

This book and Somerset's later work are a model for all those concerned not only with high quality selection systems but also with the quality of the system it d o m i n a t e s - the learning and teaching process.

Angela Little

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