After I had read the sub-chapter in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa entitled Education for Underdevelopment where the author contended that the pattern of education which Europe bequeathed to Africa was meant to be, not an agent of development, but of further impoverishment and underdevelopment of Africa, I had seriously begun to critically examine that assertion vis-à-vis the system of education in Nigeria. I had not concluded my investigations when again I stumbled upon yet another classic, Rene Dumont’s False Start in Africa. Dumont was a French professor of agronomy, but he was not an armchair professor; he was a thorough and committed field worker who dedicated his life to research on rural development in Third World economies. Somewhere in that discourse, Dumont had made a striking remark that if your sister goes to school, you will have nothing to eat but ball-point pen. Immediately my mind went back to Rodney, and I had no doubt in my mind that the pattern of education we inherited from our European overlords was indeed education for underdevelopment; a pattern of education that gives its recipient a false sense of importance, a false feeling of being above all else, and, worst of all, a feeling that his rightful place is in a cosy, air-conditioned office, with fat salary attached, a company-paid apartment, a chauffeur-driven car, and other sundry privileges. » Read more: Nigeria’s Ball-Point Pen Education