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Until the early 1900s, formal education in Ethiopia was confined to a system of religious instruction organized and presented under the aegis of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
Church schools prepared individuals for the clergy and for other religious duties and positions. In the process, these schools also provided religious education to the children of the nobility and to the sons of limited numbers of tenant farmers and servants associated with elite families.
Such schools mainly served the Amhara and Tigray inhabitants of the Ethiopian highlands. Misguided policies caused very few children to receive an education. As a result, Ethiopia did not meet the Educational standards of other African countries in the early 1900s.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century Menelik II had also permitted the establishment of European missionary schools. At the same time, Islamic schools provided some education for a small part of the Muslim population.
Atthe beginning of the twentieth century, the education system’s failure to meet the needs of people involved in statecraft, diplomacy, commerce, and industry led to the introduction of government-sponsored secular education.
The first public school to provide a western style education was the Ecole Imperiale Menelik II, which was opened in October 1908 under the guidance of Hanna Salib and a number of Copt teachers. By 1924, Pankhurst notes that “no fewer than 3,000 students had passed through the school”, and states that in 1935 the school had 150 pupils. That same year, Emperor Menelik II established a primary school in Harar.
In 1925 the government adopted a plan to expand secular education, but ten years later there were only 8,000 students enrolled in twenty public schools.
A few students also studied abroad on government scholarships; Pankhurst provides minimum numbers for several countries: at least 20 studied in Lebanon, 19 in Egypt, 12 in Sudan, 63 in France, 25 in England, 8 in the United States, 10 in Switzerland, 10 in Italy, and smaller numbers in Germany, Belgium and Spain.
After their conquest of Ethiopia, the Italians acted quickly to reorganize the educational system in Ethiopia.
An ordinance issued 24 July 1936 reiterated the principle that the newly conquered country, as in the older colonies, would have two different types of educational institutions, namely “Italian type schools” and schools for “colonial subjects.”
The existing Tafari Makonnen School was converted into two “Italian type” schools, the Liceo-Ginnasio Vittorio Emanuele III and the Istituto Tecnico Benito Mussolini, both reserved for European children, while the prewar Empress Menen School for girls was converted into the Regina Elena military hospital.
Many other existing schools were converted to Italian-only schools, while new schools created for the native population, in the words of Patrick Roberts, were “not schools in reality, but have been established for propaganda purposes.”
Although the Italian government boasted in 1939 that there were thirteen primary schools in the province of Shewa staffed by over sixty teachers and having an enrollment of 1481, actual attendance fluctuated greatly, as the official statement admitted that many students were said to be absent from class in order to follow Italian lorries, or to spend their time “idly in their tukuls.”
Following the Italian defeat, the country started to build up the sector, but the system faced shortages of teachers, textbooks, and facilities. The government recruited foreign teachers for primary and secondary schools to offset the teacher shortage.
By 1952 a total of 60,000 students were enrolled in 400 primary schools, eleven secondary schools, and three institutions offering college-level courses.
In the 1960s, 310 mission and privately operated schools with an enrollment of 52,000 supplemented the country’s public school system.
While reforms have been made in the aims of education, the actual structure of the Ethiopian school system has remained unchanged from that established in the 1950s.
To be Continued….
