“Education is widely seen as the means for constructing citizens” (Kamens, 1988:
117). Both scholars and practitioners agree on this very purpose of education. The
idea that education is a tool for turning people into citizens is not new (ibid.). The idea
that education is a tool for turning citizens into democrats, however, is quite recent.
Democrats, as defined in this paper, are citizens who not only belong to a certain
state but who actively participate in its political life. The notion that education can
construct not just citizens but democrats firstly emerged in the 1990s and ever since
countless number of governments, non-governmental organizations as well as
scholars have endorsed the expansion of Universal Primary Education (UPE)
programs throughout developing countries. The main reason behind it is the
assumption that well-educated people always become democrats, hence
participating citizens. This precisely is the working hypothesis of this paper: Citizens
who are more educated and better informed are more actively engaged in the
political life of their country. The following paper is to problematize this very
hypothesis and the reasons behind it by studying two cases in Sub-Saharan Africa
and tracing that process of transformation of political culture. The main research
question thus that will be addressed is: How does universal primary education in
Sub-Saharan Africa transform the political culture of its citizens?
In chapter 1, I will draw a conceptual framework of the research. In so doing, I
will define the concepts of education, democracy (or democrats) and political culture
and will elaborate on the specific elements of these concepts that I will focus on
during the analysis. In chapter 2, I will review primary and secondary literature on the
relationship between education and political culture aiming to: 1) establish what
policies have been endorsed by international organizations, 2) what assumptions and
ideas these policies were based on, and 3) what is still missing from the existing
literature, particularly in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Namely, this chapter will
present the arguments behind the assumption that education plays a major role in
reshaping people’s political attitudes, while raising the question how that translates
into reshaping their political practices too.