Education and Development in Ethiopia: the history of dubious correlation

During the last five decades Ethiopia experienced three systems of political governance, each of them distinguished by its education policy: the imperial (soon after WWII until 1974); the military /socialist (until 1991), and the current federal system (from 1994). This study shows the growth of the crisis of the education sector in Ethiopia, which is very much a result of the absence of range of realistic assessments of the role of education in social reproduction. As things now stand, the great majority of those students who completed grade four failed to score a pass grade. The expansion of secondary education, the continued growth of vernacular languages and the shortage of funds appear to lead the education sector from crisis to system collapse. The paper also discusses the implications of the crisis in terms of communication breakdown;