Education and Development: The Issues and the Evidence

Education and development the issues and the evidence - Education Research Paper
No. 06, 1993, 61 p.

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1.4 Scientific and technological
change

Technological changes have been a central feature of development strategies for the last
three decades. They are becoming more rather than less important in defining the
circumstances under which development will take place over the next decade.
Technological change impinges on policy on educational assistance in many ways.

The capacity of scientific and technological advances to transform the physical
environment and contribute to economic development is self evident. It is through
technology that much of the investment that has taken place in human resource
development has been transformed from ideas and possibilities to address the real world
of needs to increase food production, improve access to clean water, generate power for
industrial production, and provide infrastructure to market goods and services internally
and for export. Advances in health care, communications technology, and transport
systems have brought even the most remote areas into contact with the outside world
and have provided access to the benefits of modern inventions.

At the same time these changes have brought with them some disadvantages and have
contributed to the stresses associated with rapid change in any society. They have made
possible urbanisation on an unprecedented scale and have transformed the nature of
production, increased productivity and have reduced the needs for low cost labour for
many types of industrial production and in commercial agriculture. They may have
undermined culture and community in societies unprepared and vulnerable to rapid
change. They may have contributed to the "cultural imperialism" that some observers
associate with the marketing of consumer goods which purport to sell an (unavailable)
lifestyle along with a product and with international television programming which
projects images of affluence and conspicuous consumption into the remotest corners of
the globe.

National science and technology policy, and its articulation with educational policy and
educational assistance, take on a new significance against this background.
Oversimplifying considerably there have been two distinctly different views of the role
of science and technology in development. First there are those who see development as
essentially a problem of technology transfer from industrialized countries to those with

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