This is one of the most important articles from the research I’ve been doing about Rwanda’s education system since I started working on this issue nearly a decade ago. The paper is titled ‘The things they learned: aspiration, uncertainty, and schooling in Rwanda’s development state.’ It draws on the passionate voices of children and teachers to look at local experiences of education policy and to consider implications for the government’s state-building project. The bottom-up perspective in the paper serves as a complement to the top-down political economy lens focused on this same issue published in World Development last year.
The title of the paper was inspired by Tim O’Brien’s classic book, “The Things They Carried” in which the author narrates the deeply personal experiences of soldiers through the material possessions they carried within them to war. Informed by this perspective, this paper offers an account of what children learned—i.e., how they thought about themselves and their futures—through their experience of school and in a context in which the future felt far from certain.
The Journal of Development Studies publishes about 11 percent of the 1,100 submissions it receives each year.