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Paper short abstract:

By examining the collapse of public education during the 1970s, this paper argues that neoliberalism took root in Ghana well before structural adjustment programs were adopted in the 1980s.

Paper long abstract:

Universal, free, academic public education was the bedrock of Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for Ghanaian development in the 1950s and 1960s. To that end, education dominated government spending in the first decade of independence. Yet, by the late 1970s, Ghanaian families spent more on private education than any other African nation. What had gone wrong? This paper examines the rise of neoliberalism in Ghana from the perspective of public education. It argues that the collapse of a viable public schooling system during the 1970s created an opening for the private schooling sector to flourish in Ghana well before structural adjustment programs were adopted by the Jerry Rawlings regime in the 1980s.

By focusing on public schooling, this paper analyzes the larger notion of “the postcolonial state” in terms that were meaningful to ordinary people. Going to school was paramount for many families (as indicated by the amount Ghanaians spent privately on education). The state’s inability to safeguard Nkrumah’s vision of universal public education created a crisis of faith in the state itself, leading to the erosion of a socialist future in favor of a neoliberal one.

Tracing the emergence of neoliberalism from the grassroots helps nuance our understanding of the ways that neoliberalism found purchase in Ghana. Neither imposed unilaterally from the outside nor a purely endogenous development, neoliberal education policies triumphed not because they had won any ideological war, but because the battle for public education had already been lost.