Haile Selassie, Western Education and Political Revolution in Eth ...

with others. The new elite preparing to enter the job market did not find the expected rewards forthcoming. Dim career prospects pitted them against those who were already deeply entrenched. The modern educated intelligentsia thus started to fragment. The established ones who had substantially benefited from the individual recompenses either became quiescent or openly attached themselves to the old order. But the new elites who had not benefited from such requitals and had therefore not been co-opted were alienated from the established order. They then started championing the causes of the masses by assailing the system’s apparent socioeconomic weaknesses.

Since economic development cannot take place in the absence of educational expansion, the Haile Selassie regime’s commitment or non-commitment in that sphere became detrimental to its very survival. But in both cases, it faced a paradox. Too much educational growth which entails larger and larger numbers of educated personnel made material remunerations with which the elites were initially co-opted dangerously thin, thus increasing the chances of rebellion. Too little educational expansion also alienated the educated youth who had accepted the West’s normative values and standards, and thus opened the regime to severe criticism which was even more detrimental. Clearly, Haile Selassie’s feudalism suffered more from the second than from the first. But there was also a certain amount of the first element since pedagogical expansion in Ethiopia from the 1950s through the 1970s favored higher education in liberal arts and social sciences despite the fact that there were severe shortages of skilled labor in technical areas. Growing numbers of elite, university educated graduates without concomitant rewards or even jobs had significantly increased the ranks of the educated rebels especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s thus heightening the tempo of hostilities leveled against Haile Selassie’s feudalism.

The role of education and educated students and teachers in preci­pitating a revolution in developing societies needs very close scrutiny. Indeed, in countries where serious socioeconomic problems exist although the illiterate rural masses are quiescent, however miserable their condition, education acts as a stimulus for political