Another objective of the 1948 reform was to expand technical education, justified, it was said, by the Congo's expected economic development under its 10-year development plan. In accord with a general policy of adapting education to the milieu, two different types of technical programs were to be offered: one for urban and one for rural areas. Soon afterwards, the first step was taken to provide higher education at home for students trained in Congo secondary schools. As Van Hove said in his study of the early 1950's, the Belgian Government had decided to maintain the principle that African students should receive their undergraduate university training at home rather than in Belgium; but it was not at all opposed to sending Congolese university graduates to Belgium. The Government had drawn a lesson from the experiences of other colonial countries that had sent students to Europe; namely, that a long stay there had often been harmful to the young Africans and had made it difficult for them to readapt themselves to the African environment. In 1949 the agricultural and medical school that the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium had been operating at Kisantu in the Congo since 1925 became "Lovanium, Congolese University Center." At first, Lovanium offered "higher technical education" to train technicians in administrative, agricultural, and medical sciences. Second Stage Only a few years after the 1948 reform, the second stage began. During this stage Belgian programs of secondary and higher education became available to the Congolese. Most of the official schools established for Congolese after 1954 offered Belgian programs and this action sparked (as probably intended) a general movement in the Congolese secondary schools. Emulating these new official institutions, schools which had been offering only Congolese programs began to introduce the Belgian programs. In other words, as students entered the lowest class they began immediately with those programs, while students in the higher classes were finishing the old Congolese ones. This process was well underway when legal provisions for the Belgian programs was made in 1958. In the meantime, after 1952, for the first time Congolese students who met certain standards were permitted to enter schools for Belgian students and thus some Congolese students were taking Belgian courses outside the Congolese system. In 1954 Lovanium began to offer higher education programs comparable to those offered in Belgium. It started its first preuniversity program in January of that year and in the fall, with 21 students enrolled, its first university program proper. Reflecting the Government's decision not to leave higher education entirely to a private institution, the Official University of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, created in 1955, opened its doors in November 1956 to its first 79 students. Two years later, when the movement toward higher secondary school standards was well underway and both universities were offering Belgian-type programs, the Government enacted the very important decree of November 25, 1958, on the awarding of academic degrees in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. By this time the Government's overriding objective was that university degrees awarded in the Congo should win recognition as the equivalent of those awarded in Belgium. In July 1958 Belgian representatives at the annual International Conference on Public Education in Geneva, Switzerland, when explaining the nature of university education in the Congo, stated: ". . . the Africans demand first of all qualifications equivalent to those in metropolitan universities." 995 It is not surprising that the decree provided for higher education very closely modeled on that of Belgium. By laying down Belgian university admission requirements as permanent ones in the Congo, the decree also in effect provided that the Belgian academic secondary programs were to be taught in those secondary schools of the Congo that prepared students for university admission. There is evidence that a reform not of the 6-year secondary schools only, but of the entire structure of secondary education, was intended at this time. Thus, on November 25, 1958, only about 18 months before independence, the Belgian Government legally provided for secondary and higher education in the Congo exactly with few exceptions-like such education in Belgium, the "metropole"-a type of education never even existing in the Congolese system until 1954. The reforms spelled out in the decree and the earlier reforms of the 1950's came so late, however, that at the time of independence in June 1960, the Congo's educational system still reflected more of the old policies than of the new. "Collation des grades académiques." No. 24, 15 décembre 1958. p. 2300-23. present bulletin. Bulletin Officiel du Congo-Belge. 51 Année, UNESCO/International Bureau of Education. XXIst International Conference on Public Education 1958 (Publication No. 196). Paris/Geneva: The Organization/the Bureau, 1958. p. 84. |