Educational television in the Ivory Coast

After two years of study and research, the Ivory Coast has drawn up a far-reaching, ambitious programme for televised education. The aim is to ensure that all children receive primary schooling, to achieve this in fifteen years, and to use the national network of schools equipped with television to provide education for children and adults alike all over the country. This is an ambitious project, calling for an exceptional effort on the part of a national community to raise, once and for all, the educational level of an entire population and to cut through the tangle of obstacles which developing countries encounter in their struggle against ignorance. This undertaking is a good example of a country and its government becoming aware of the close relationship between its economic development and its educational system. It reveals the essential links between the community and the school and the results of their interaction on a nation-wide scale and, of course, at the local level. It is an example, too, of the modernization of an educational system which is based alike on genuine national cultural values and on the use of the most up-to-date teaching methods and techniques—two principles which combine quite naturally, as I shall try to show here. now chief technical adviser to the Ivory Coast educational television programme.