In the United States we are constantly told that all the problems of the black race are the fault of the white race. Meanwhile the worst of the black ruled nations, are the ones who have been black ruled the longest.
Haiti and Liberia are widely seen as two of the worst nations in the world. Liberia is the oldest black ruled nation in Africa. It has had full independence and devoid of white people since 1847. It was set up by wealthy white philanthropists for repatriated former black slaves.
Haiti is the oldest black ruled nation in the world. It has been completely independent and black ruled since 1803. All of the whites and Mulatto who could not flee to Louisiana were slaughtered in a bloodbath. There were no white people left to oppress them. At the time Haiti was called “the jewel of the Caribbean.” The island produced enough sugar and other crops to make all the residents prosperous had they actually maintained any of the farms.
The University of Liberia is the oldest black run institution of higher learning in the world. It was originally founded as Liberia College in 1863 with money from wealthy American philanthropists.
From Bloomberg BusinessWeek…
The University of Liberia last week issued the results of its entrance examination, which tests students on the basis of what they should have learned from their high school curriculum in English and math. Places at the university were hotly contested—25,000 people paid the $25 fee to take the test. For the first time, the exam was implemented independently, to reduce the risk of favoritism and corruption. The results made Harvard’s admissions ratio (where 1 in 17 applicants is accepted) look like that of a commuter school: Every single applicant was rejected on the basis of a failing exam grade.
Under pressure from Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the university was forced to regrade on a curve and let in the top 1,800 scorers. But the president has admitted the country’s schools are struggling. And, sadly, Liberia’s woes are hardly unique. Around the developing world, hundreds of millions of students are learning only a fraction of what the syllabuses suggest they should, and often they leave school without even a basic grasp of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Unaddressed, the global learning challenge is likely to become a serious drag on worldwide growth.
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At higher academic levels, the problem may be even worse. In Liberia only 308 of the university entrance exam takers passed the 50 percent grade for math, and not a single applicant scored the passing 70 percent grade in English. Analysis by Harvard’s Lant Pritchett suggests that the average eighth-grader in Ghana has test scores on math and science that would place her in the bottom one-five-hundredth of U.S. students. Even richer and more successful countries such as Argentina or Indonesia see scores on international math and science tests that would rank the average test-taker in the bottom 10 percent of the student population of a country like Denmark.
The learning gap helps to explain how developing countries can be so poor despite high educational attainment. In 2010 the average Kenyan adult had spent more years in school than the average French adult had as recently as 1985. Sadly, that didn’t convert into a Kenyan income per capita equal to France’s two decades ago—in fact, the gross domestic product per head in Kenya in 2010 was only 7 percent of France’s in 1985.