Planning Education and Manpower in the Middle East,1950s–60s

‘In today’s world, it is the knowledge gap rather than the income gap that is likely to be the most critical determinant of the fortunes of countries across the world’, stated the Arab Human Development Plan of 2002, published by the United Nations Development Programme. ‘At the beginning of the third millennium, knowledge constitutes the road to development and liberation, especially in a world of intensive globalization.’ ¹ While such declarations are legion in the reports surrounding recent development goals, education is strangely absent from much of the scholarly literature on development. This article explores the place of education in international development agencies and in central plans of the 1950s and 1960s in the Middle East and beyond. Through this prism and in line with the more general outlook of the special section, it shows how entire societies and not merely industry and agriculture became the target of planning and future projections.

Education therefore needs to be inserted into histories of development and modernization. Frequently these histories target large projects such as dams, factories and the cultivation of new crops. ² If aimed at individuals, matters of hygiene or nutrition often come into focus, equally directed at the transformation of the physical world. Yet this emphasis only gives us half the story. The recreation of the interior and social world of men and women was intimately linked to the planning projects of postcolonial leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere. ³ Shaping individuals and societies was as important as shaping the natural environment and the economy. What is more, terms such as ‘human capital’, ‘human resources’ and, most frequently, ‘manpower’ assumed an increasingly important role in the planning effort. The position of education and the calculation of manpower needs connected to five-year plans is a case in point to show that in the 1950s and 1960s, debates around development were not only about ‘hardware’ in the guise of agricultural, industrial and infrastructural investment, but also about the transmission of soft skills and expertise. ⁴

This article links the literature on development with research on planning. Commenting on its emergence in vastly different political constellations, Anselm Döring-Manteuffel has called planning an ‘icon of the twentieth century’. ⁵ In a recent survey, David Engerman has reviewed the ‘fuzziness of what planning actually was’, as it metamorphosed from the pre-war planning traditions of the Soviet Union and the American New Deal to the planning of war economies and then to the ‘post-war planning boom’. ⁶

Five-year plans, however, to refer to just one example of this planning euphoria, have almost exclusively been analysed as economic policy interventions. Yet in postcolonial contexts, planning was never merely economic but also fundamentally social, often blurring the boundaries with social engineering. ⁷ Educational planning as a subfield of central planning is particularly well suited to shed light on this social dimension. For many leaders of decolonization processes, it formed a central building block in the endeavour of creating ‘new men’ and ‘new societies’. ⁸ Just like planning itself, educational planning was often loosely defined. It could take different guises of course, from a mere emphasis on skills and training to the exact calculation of manpower needs in different sectors of the economy, thus also connecting with the history of statistics, econometrics and other ways of calculating the future. ⁹

Educational planning was linked to a range of different meanings from liberating discourses related to the empowerment of the individual to economic calculations regarding output in terms of ‘human capital’, ‘human resources’ and ‘manpower’. Such terms, which entered the discourse in the second half of the 1950s, were coined or made prominent in specific contexts, for instance by US economists such as Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker in the case of human capital. Yet this is only where their journey began, as they were used by international organizations or adopted by decolonization leaders. In this way the terms soon developed lives of their own, losing their clear demarcation and definition as well as shifting their ideological affiliation.

In the following, I shall connect these more general debates on planning manpower and education with specific institutes in the Middle East, in particular the Egyptian Institute of National Planning in Cairo. In addition to other sources, the article draws on this institute’s extensive publications and on its correspondence with the Ford Foundation which financed its endeavours. Prioritizing one such institute allows us to investigate the place of educational and manpower planning in the general planning effort of the late 1950s and early 1960s in postcolonial states. This approach shows how the expertise of international organizations was disseminated or rather how local actors actively complemented it with other sources of information. This focus allows the article to combine two scales of analysis, highlighting the role of educational planning at the level both of international organizations and of its materialization in the Egyptian planning effort.

The article falls into three parts. The first part looks broadly at the historical connection between planning and education and then at the more specific vocabulary of manpower and human capital introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. Here UN affiliated institutions and US funding bodies such as the Ford Foundation played a central role. The second part looks at the ‘post-war planning boom’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s in more detail. It shows how this framework of educational planning was applied in the Middle East and, more particularly, in Egypt where education was prominent in the first five-year plan covering the years 1960 to 1965. In this period Egypt emerged as one of the leaders of the movement of non-aligned states. Egypt thus served as a model, but it was also itself looking for points of reference for its planning effort. As will become clear, the Egyptian educational planners took only some of their expertise from the institutions highlighted in the first part, and complemented it with contributions from the Soviet Union, the GDR, and India, to list just the most prominent examples. The third part picks up the chronology where we left it at the end of the first part and takes us back to the level of international institutions. It traces the transformation of planning in the late 1960s and early 1970s and illustrates how these debates merged with broader concerns regarding the role of knowledge in modern societies and economies.

What was the toolkit available to educational planners in the 1950s and 1960s? The vocabulary used to capture educational ‘output’ over time originated in socialist, US and colonial policies which found their way into postcolonial discussions around education. They were connected and contrasted with the educational conceptions of leaders of the liberation struggle such as Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral. The alliance between planning and education thus began before the Second World War but it was only in the early 1960s that educational initiatives received funding from the major international development agencies and were translated into the development plans of the newly decolonized countries.

Of course, the origins of some of the broader debates linking education and economic development went back even further. In Britain, for instance, debates around improving the living standards of working classes targeted the educational system and reflected on the question how every individual could be allocated the right place in society. The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb described the ideal educational system as a ‘capacity-catching machine’, which would select the best to go further, regardless of their social and economic background. ¹⁰ In the French context, similar ideas were put forward in connection with the system of concours. Debates around intelligence testing and exams also focused on the selection processes most suitable to identify who should receive the training to fill specific professional positions. ¹¹ To put the right people in the right place became a central maxim of educational planning.

In the decades after the First World War, similar discussions re-emerged in socialist, US and colonial contexts. The question of calculating educational needs and their connection with productivity, of course, had a particularly strong tradition in Marxist thinking. In the early Soviet Union, literacy and basic education had a prime position on the agenda. Beyond guaranteeing basic education for all, the educational system was to be based on the needs of different sectors of the work force. ¹² Reflecting on the aims of the second five-year plan, the 17th party conference in the USSR clearly moved beyond the propaganda purposes of mass primary education, defining the central task as ‘to train large masses of technically educated workers and to train engineering specialists really capable of taking responsible charge of work conducted upon the basis of up-to-date technique'. ¹³ With an emphasis on ‘skills’ and ‘personnel’, the educational goal thus went beyond propaganda and the creation of a Soviet mass culture. Education had a central place in enhancing productivity.

American debates on educational planning developed in the early 1930s in the aftermath of the Great Depression and in connection with the broader rise of planning ideologies surrounding the New Deal. ¹⁴ These debates were comparative in attitude looking especially to the efforts of the Soviet Union but also to other locations. ¹⁵ To give just one example of this larger discourse: in 1936, the New York University sociologist Francis Brown reviewed the current wave of curriculum reconstruction in US society, expressing the need to achieve more uniformity and state control over the educational process. He compared the US education system’s lack of centralization with systems in France, Russia, Germany and Italy arguing for a more interventionist state and concluding that ‘we can achieve social planning only by redefining democracy – not in terms of individual liberty and freedom of action but as it was originally and constitutionally defined – to promote the general welfare.’ ¹⁶ In the 1930s this area of policy making was already heavily marked by transfer and comparison and by heated discussions about the ideal society that new forms of education were intended to produce.

In relation to debates on development and welfare, planned educational expansion also came to occupy a central position in colonial contexts. ¹⁷ In the US colony of the Philippines, education, social planning and development were explicitly connected. ¹⁸ In the British Empire, the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, established in 1924, discussed correlations between education and development. While missionaries and other non-state actors had, to a significant extent, been in charge of education in the colonies, now, the colonial state attempted to take tighter control of this policy field. Mass education and community development programmes, frequently experimental in character, multiplied. ¹⁹

In the colonial context of the interwar period, the comparative attitude was particularly striking. The Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies William Ormsby-Gore summarized the situation in 1929:

Since the Great War nearly every country has been examining its educational system and its educational method with critical scrutiny … Just as in England, or in the continent of Europe, and in America, the last ten years have been a period of educational criticism, transition, and development, so in the Colonial Empire there has been a period of remarkable growth … Experiment and development are the order of the day. ²⁰

As a consequence of this attitude, British Empire bureaucrats such as Ormsby-Gore let their gaze roam and took inspiration from literacy campaigns in the Soviet Union or the Jeanes School experiments aimed at African-Americans in the Southern states of the USA, for example. ²¹

Colonial education was increasingly connected with the planning of the future, both in economic and in political terms, although it was deliberately left open when this future would materialize. A 1943 publication of the Advisory Committee on Education, like other contemporary publications on mass education and community development, in fact highlighted the need to educate the whole community including children and adults. ²² It anticipated the UN’s rhetoric on trusteeship and explicitly adopted the rhetoric of planning in the broadest sense, emphasizing that every colonized people first needed to acquire sufficient knowledge in order to ‘exercise control of the planning by which its own destiny is to be shaped’. ²³ Western-style education, or its lack, could therefore also be used to justify continued colonization.

Anti-colonial thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s took up this specific challenge, embracing colonial education or explicitly rejecting it. In India as elsewhere, the role of education in overcoming colonialism was vigorously debated. Influential figures such as Rabindranath Tagore or Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi adopted very specific positions regarding a particularly Indian kind of education, while Jawaharlal Nehru was taken with the idea of planning from the late 1930s onwards. ²⁴ More than ideological quibbles, debates around educational expansion and planning clearly illustrate the emergence and interconnection of two strands of thinking, one economic and one political: educational planning was seen to be crucial for the achievement of higher productivity, and for individual and political self-determination.

The 1950s and 1960s translated these various approaches into the era of decolonization and the Cold War. They added a more explicitly economic vocabulary to the discourse, directly correlating the expansion of skills with economic growth. The terms manpower, human resources and human capital appeared in very different settings. They had distinct cycles, but were all founded in the belief that the economy could be steered and planned, based on effectiveness and optimization.

One especially influential example can underline this point and demonstrate the arsenal of terms and theories that development planners could choose from when devising their national plans. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US economists and future Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz quantified manpower under the rubric of human capital with the help of econometric tools. Human capital, not physical capital would lead economies to ‘take off’, to use the terminology later made prominent by Walt Whitman Rostow. ²⁵ The equation was simple: investments in education and training would increase productivity and innovation. Growth and economic development would follow and, in turn, would lead to social development and ‘modernization’. Schultz summarized his thesis in his 1961 publication ‘Investment in Human Capital’, stating that skills and knowledge had to be seen as a form of capital which was the product of ‘deliberate investment’. Comparing the different economic growth patterns between Western and non-Western societies, increases could not be explained by ‘increases in land, manhours or physical reproducible capital’, but in his view, it was the spectacular growth of human capital that accounted for it. ²⁶ Becker’s and Schultz’s human capital theory exemplifies how education was connected to the planned development of economies. The question remains how such concepts found their way into international and national contexts, in the Middle East and beyond, and whether and how local actors adopted them.

Different international organizations disseminated such discourses connecting education and planning. Agencies responsible for spreading the development and modernization discourse more generally included the World Bank, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the OECD. The notion that an increase in highly qualified manpower would automatically lead to industrialization and to the growth of the economy seemed straightforward to many and entered the programmatic publications of the UN ‘development decade’ of the 1960s. ²⁷ The mounting interest in education at the level of international institutions was reflected in the fact that until 1961 the World Bank had not granted a single loan or credit in the field of education, while between 1963 and 1969, 244 million dollars were spent in this field. ²⁸

Other actors tried to devise schemes to put such visions of development into practice, for instance the ILO and especially its director David Morse. Here the term ‘manpower’ was particularly prominent. As early as 1953, David Morse had coined the slogan ‘Manpower is wealth’ during a visit to Cairo. In order for a country to generate wealth, ‘there must be production, in order to have production, people must be trained, people must be taught, in order to be taught, people must be educated along certain lines and the net result of all this is wealth’. ²⁹ As a consequence of this thinking, the ILO championed the transformation of unskilled workers into skilled workers as a fast track to development. The rival institution, OECD, founded in 1961, from the outset included a Manpower, Social Affairs and Education Directorate in its organizational structure. ³⁰

International initiatives and institutions acted as nodes from where the focus of development economics on education was distributed to regions such as the Middle East. The International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) in Paris, affiliated with UNESCO was instrumental in this diffusion. It was created in 1963 to collect expertise and provide training opportunities for government officials in the specific field of educational planning, which by this time had become a standing expression. While the IIEP was a UNESCO institution, its funding came partly from the World Bank and partly from the American Ford Foundation. ³¹ This did not come as a surprise, as its founding director, Philip Coombs, before a short spell as part of the John F. Kennedy administration, had been a programme director of the Ford Foundation, illustrating the typical career trajectory of experts between private foundations, national governments and international institutions.

One of the aims of the institute was to shift plans from mere quantitative expansion to qualitative change based on manpower projections. ³² A further crucial target was the dissemination of political and economic ideas through the teaching and internship programme. Coombs pointed once again to the relationship between social planning and education and to this special UNESCO institute’s role in steering this development and reacting to, rather than initiating the expansion of education outlined above. With clear reference to the processes of decolonization he described the ‘unprecedented acceleration of educational expansion and change’, which originated in the social and economic developments of the 1950s and 1960s. This applied especially to those nations emerging politically from colonization and economically from underdevelopment. Despite the half-hearted colonial schemes of the 1930s and 1940s, they were starting from a ‘very narrow educational base’ and thus had to produce the human resources for their economic growth as quickly as possible. ³³ The IIEP took on the task of channelling and directing this educational expansion, in short, of planning it.

How did this emphasis on connecting development and education spread to regions such as the Middle East? In the year of its foundation, the IIEP established a regional centre in Beirut, headed by Abdel Aziz El Koussy, who was in charge of training Middle Eastern officials in educational planning. El Koussy’s career resembles Philip Coombs’ biography in terms of navigating between national and international institutions. He was one of the first Egyptian psychologists to return to Egypt after studies in Britain and set up a branch of the New Education Fellowship while establishing the field of psychology working as a lecturer in Cairo. ³⁴ After an interlude as an Egyptian government official, El Koussy attempted to move into the world of international organizations. This did not prove to be straightforward. In 1959, he was considered as a potential head of UNESCO’s education department but his application was not successful. But in 1963, El Koussy moved from Cairo to Beirut to take up a post as director of the Regional Centre for Educational Planning and Administration for the Arab States, the Middle Eastern branch of the IIEP.

El Koussy’s own writing exemplifies the shift from the social and individual role of education to its larger economic purpose made explicit in the theories of Theodor Schultz, Gary Becker and others and shows how this thinking entered Egyptian discourses. In 1956 he had spoken at the New Education Fellowship’s conference in Utrecht, arguing that at a time of transition ‘[s]ocial reform, unsupported by education, is impossible or at best short-lived’. ³⁵ Some years later, just as Egypt was devising its first five-year plan, El-Koussy replaced this terminology with a vocabulary more explicitly echoing the economic discourses outlined above. As an adviser to the Egyptian Ministry of Education, El Koussy advocated the expansion of technical education in a country where this field had been neglected and government posts were more sought after than a career in industry and commerce. Manpower, in the form of skilled and educated workers, was to drive industrialization. Education, furthermore, was to serve as a buffer for the wide-ranging and rapid changes experienced by Egyptians. ³⁶

The IIEP regional centre in Beirut, headed by El Koussy, trained more than 500 educational planners from the Middle East between 1963 and 1971. It thus formed a nodal point in disseminating expertise regarding the connection of education and development. The impact of this training is, of course, difficult to assess. An inspection report of 1971 shows that the completion of the Centre’s task was not entirely unproblematic, drawing particular attention to the selection of students at least during the early courses, when nominating ministries could simply appoint delegates, without any quality check of the centre itself. Consequently, the training courses in Beirut at times became ‘a kind of reward for good behaviour’. In these cases, the centre was not able (or willing) to reject any government-sponsored candidates, ‘no matter how ill-equipped for the course these were’. For instance, many of the students were already quite old when embarking on the course, making it unlikely that they would be able to employ any expertise they gained in a politically relevant way. They also had very different levels of previous knowledge and experience in the field. This recruitment problem was not the only criticism that the report contained. Others related to equipment and teaching staff at the centre. ³⁷

The regional branch in the Middle East illustrates how clearing houses connected to the international organizations gathered, filtered, and circulated information. At the same time it can help us to complicate a one-directional conception of international institutions and US funding bodies simply disseminating the vocabulary of manpower and educational planning to other world regions. Rather, the problems encountered by the IIEP in Beirut encourage a more cautious approach regarding the circulation of concepts. As the next part will show planners ‘on the spot’ complemented the propositions of international institutions with other influences. They developed a ‘pick-and-mix attitude’ to choosing different elements as they saw fit.

If planning education systems and their output had a longer history, dating back to the 1920s or even earlier, the late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a veritable ‘planning fervour’ on a global scale. ³⁸ Central planning seemed the right answer to the desire of postcolonial countries to complement political independence with economic development. Many, if not most, newly decolonized countries adopted five- or 10-year plans for economic growth and social reconstruction. Their plans shared some elements, notably a belief in rapid economic and social change through optimal use of resources and the promise of statistics and econometrics.

This formed the context of the first Egyptian development plan covering the period 1960 to 1965 which had the ambitious aim of increasing national income by 40 per cent over its five-year term. It supported more than 1400 individual projects of development in various sectors of the economy. ³⁹ As in the case of the 2000-page long first Soviet plan or the equally extensive Indonesian plan, it provided a huge amount of detail regarding the statistical economic development of the years to come. ⁴⁰

The plan came at a time of high Egyptian self-confidence. Nasser had emerged as one of the charismatic leaders of the global non-aligned movement at the Bandung Conference, just before the conception of the plan began to speed up. ⁴¹ In the late 1950s, the United States of America and the Soviet Union both recognized Egypt as a central strategic partner. ⁴² Because of its prominent position in the Arab and African worlds, Egypt was at the intersection of different and shifting interests. ⁴³ The 1956 Suez Crisis had disrupted relations between London and Cairo. But the USA still valued Egypt as an actor of regional stability, although it was wary of Egyptian nationalism and pan-Arab tendencies. After the signing of an Egyptian–Czech arms deal, Eisenhower terminated financial aid to Egypt in 1955. The annexation of Syria in 1958 and the creation of the United Arab Republic (UAR) were further points of concern for the USA. From late 1958 onwards, however, Eisenhower changed his course of action again. In an attempt to make Nasser ‘forsake the microphone for the bulldozer’, funding Egyptian infrastructural projects was back on the agenda and continued under the Kennedy administration. ⁴⁴ Yet by 1962 the USA had to admit that its strategy had proved problematic, when Nasser supported the republican side in Yemen’s civil war, while the USA backed the royalists. Just a few months before his assassination, Kennedy had to change his course, demonstrating the volatility of US policy towards the country.

Nasser’s first five-year plan is usually mentioned in the context of development thinking centred on industrialization. And industrialization did, indeed, play a vital role in the conceptions of postcolonial leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser. When Egypt’s first five-year plan was devised, many of the transformations pushing Egypt towards industrialization were well underway. ⁴⁵ Construction of the High Dam at Aswan, to mention but the most famous case, started in 1960. It had been planned since Nasser’s rise to power in 1952 and, in fact, forms an excellent illustration of Egypt’s shifting relations with Cold War powers, subsequently being funded by USA and Soviet aid programmes. ⁴⁶ Although many of the drives for rapid industrialization were thus already in place and established without formal state planning, bureaucrats, and not least Nasser himself, portrayed planning as a crucial element in speeding up economic growth and in envisaging a politically and economically independent future, which would not assume an accidental form but rather a clearly premeditated one.

As the belief – or the rhetoric – that the future could be optimized by planning reached its high point, a focus on education and knowledge in the wider sense increasingly shaped visions of this future and complemented the emphasis on heavy industry. In line with the projects of many other decolonization leaders, educational expansion was part and parcel of populist politics aiming to create a new society. ⁴⁷ Education and knowledge also played a crucial role in the plan itself. One aim was to introduce countrywide primary education. Another was to emphasise on technical education so that Egyptians trained in the most up-to-date technologies could replace foreign experts.

Two quotations by Gamal Abdel Nasser, preceding the five-year-plan, further illustrate this emphasis on education, knowledge and expertise. The first is taken from a speech Nasser had given to mark Cairo University’s Golden Jubilee in 1958: ‘In the coming era, knowledge shall be the true power’. By placing this statement on the front page of the development plan, he alluded not only to the expertise that had gone into the plan but also the educational advancement that would follow its execution. The second quotation introducing the plan referred more explicitly to the experts creating it, again highlighting the social dimensions of planning: ‘Building a society is not an easy matter. Indeed it is a difficult task, for we are not only building a new society but we are also making the design for this society before building it, all by ourselves.’ ⁴⁸ Yet it might not come as a surprise, given the network of international organizations and Egypt’s embroilment in the Cold War outlined above, that the powerfully invoked Egyptian social engineers were not planning in isolation, ‘by themselves’. Rather, as we shall see, they were entangled in a transnational web of expert knowledge related to forecasting and modifying future societies.

As in other countries, Egypt’s planning effort came with a whole new set of bureaucracies and institutions, including a ministry of planning and a national planning committee. In July 1960 the Egyptian Institute of National Planning (INP) was established to complement these institutions. The person Nasser placed in charge of establishing and directing this new institute was Egypt’s chief planner, Ibrahim Helmi Abdel Rahman, who had been responsible for drawing up the first five-year plan, but had clashed with Nasser over the president’s insistence on over-ambitious growth rates. Abdel Rahman’s biography once again exemplifies the navigation between the national and the international levels, which was typical of the experts connected with such institutions. Trained in the field of astrophysics in the United Kingdom, he returned to Egypt to take up an academic position before moving first into national and then international politics. After his involvement with Egypt’s planning work, he was to become director of the UN Industrial Development Organization UNIDO (1967–75) before returning to the national level as Minister of Planning under Anwar Sadat. Abdel Rahman’s career thus veered between academia and politics and between national and international organizations.

Envisaged as a centre of research and training, the Institute of National Planning eventually took up residence in the newly developed Nasr City, thus symbolically connecting urban and development planning. Like the Beirut branch of the IIEP, the INP ran a training programme and invited experts to guide Egyptian planners. It published a large number of memoranda and occasional papers, numbering 444 by May 1964 and more than 900 by 1969. These pamphlets highlight the institute’s two central characteristics, namely its reliance on expertise from other countries, and its references to comparable contexts from which Egypt could learn. They also elucidate the focus on statistics, projecting family income, the growth of the different economic sectors, and the accompanying manpower needs that Egypt would face over the coming decades.

The institute assembled a mosaic of expertise within its walls. With experts from India, Nigeria, the USSR, Sweden, Norway, the GDR and other countries contributing publications, learning from different cases was imperative. ⁴⁹ Pitambar Pant, one of India’s chief planners and statisticians, was a frequent contributor to the Institute’s publications. ⁵⁰ Egyptian experts were eager to draw comparisons between different planning traditions. Yousry Aly Mostafa, for instance, examined the French tradition of statistics and planning as a possible framework for the Egyptian experience. ⁵¹ Contributions concerning international aid or development were sometimes published in other world regions before emerging in the memoranda series, again pointing to the travelling of expertise between different locations. ⁵² Members of the institute also frequently travelled abroad themselves. The Institute established a long-term training programme and a programme abroad at the Institute of National Planning in East Berlin. ⁵³ The institute therefore assembled a highly transnational body of expertise, created to bolster national and economic sovereignty, going far beyond the exchanges between the USA on the one side and Egypt on the other that grant-givers such as the Ford Foundation envisaged.

In the publications and at the training courses, econometrics and statistics emerged as central disciplines. The predominant role of social science tools and the reflection on up-to-date statistics and projections of course had a long tradition in planning discourses, taking us back, once again, to the interwar period. As Soviet statistician and economist Valerian Obolensky-Ossinsky had declared in the 1930s, Soviet state planning required the processing of large amounts of statistical data, leading to an intermarriage between social science and technology, and firmly linking research on planning to the history of statistics. ⁵⁴ Yet there were also early critics of the accuracy of these tools. One of them, Russian émigré sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, defined planning as ‘that in which the results achieved coincide with those foreseen, and exactly in the way that was intended’, claiming that this mirroring of reality and the statistics produced was never actually realized. ⁵⁵

In contrast to such scepticism, in the 1960s, the experts connected through the Institute of National Planning in Cairo strongly believed in the power of calculation and statistics, even though the role that policy-makers assigned to these statistics, and how they were actually used, might be more difficult to assess. If planning crucially presupposed the calculation of the future, statistics became an essential tool. GDR experts, Egyptians and many others were confident of the precision of their tools for planning ahead and envisaged 20-year timelines of planning, a trend which was also reflected in the Egyptian statistics themselves. ⁵⁶

Besides this emphasis on statistical forecasting, the Egyptian Institute of National Planning’s pamphlet series illustrates the predominance of the vocabulary of manpower, human resources and human capital. In connection with the belief in statistics and forecasting, educational and manpower planning played on centre stage. Many authors in the Institute’s series made the term ‘manpower’ and the concept of good ‘utilization of human resources’ very prominent. Eastern European experts, such as the GDR economists Edwin Stiller, Ekkehard Sachse and Johannes Rudolph detected that ‘the question of manpower planning has recently been gaining in importance in the countries with a developed planning economy and in such states that seriously undertake the step by step introduction of planning’. ⁵⁷ Hassan Mustapha, to some extent echoing David Morse’s statement of 1953, made clear that:

Since the development of manpower is prior to material on [and? VH] social development in importance and is the basis upon which the material development is founded, the educational plan has paid much attention to human resources of [as? VH] the main factor in progress and the more efficiently it is developed the greater the returns to the national prosperity. ⁵⁸

Similar statements were legion in the publications, pointing to the centrality that the experts assigned the proper utilization of manpower capacity and the elimination of wasteful spending, albeit often in a rather abstract and theoretical manner.

This focus was also reflected in the Institute of National Planning’s training courses with a special subject in ‘manpower planning and educational planning’, echoing the aims of the five-year plan to provide basic education for all citizen and advanced education to the ‘fit’. The report on the course contained many statistics emphasizing technical training and special training for rural areas, and called for a national plan in order to ‘guarantee prosperity for all citizens and double the national income in 10 years’. ⁵⁹

Beyond such rather grand statements, manpower projections assigned every individual an exact place and position in society and illustrated once again the close connection between economic and social planning. These projections specified the exact numbers of managers, clerks, salesmen, skilled and unskilled labourers required in 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980 and 1985 and translated the numbers into concrete educational output needed at any particular point in time. In this way, despite the predicted population growth in the coming decades, the reservoir of unskilled workers would be the only one to diminish.

These statistics mirrored debates on the future to be expected, or rather shaped and moulded, in Egypt and in other developing countries. For instance, it was open for discussion whether they were planning for a fully industrialized or, in fact, a post-industrial society in which mathematicians, economists and computer scientists would occupy a leading position. The statistical projections therefore also connected with an emerging belief in cybernetics and future studies that would materialize during the 1960s in Europe and the USA as well. ⁶⁰

The use of computers at the Institute illustrates these visions of a future made calculable by new technologies. In Egypt, the employment of computers in the preparation of national development plans dated back to the beginning of the planning initiative of 1957. Representatives of the Institute of National Planning, above all its director Ibrahim Helmi Abdel Rahman, were convinced that computers were needed to create reliable forecasting data. ⁶¹ Here, US and Soviet contributions interconnected particularly closely. The US company IBM had been involved in Soviet planning as a supplier of punch cards since the 1930s. In the 1960s the memoranda of the Institute of National Planning highlighted Soviet computer experiments and the concurrent use of IBM computers. ⁶² In this context, Egypt developed into a hub, which could draw on the expertise of different and competing actors in the field.

The reliance on computer experts from the USA and the Soviet Union respectively serves again to illustrate the ‘pick-and-mix attitude’ in the assemblage of expertise and technology already mentioned above. Yet the role of computers in these projections remained ambivalent. A report of 1970 described the early 1960s, ‘when the huge computers of today were still under the process of design and research’ and pointed to the divergence between computer technologies and other statistical devices. It outlined the ‘development of operational models in the different sectors and hence at the comprehensive national level’ and the huge amount of data this required. It depicted the controversy between the experts who believed in ‘classical techniques of planning based on sets of balances and target setting’, and those applying linear programming and computers and concluded that the first group, endorsing traditional methods, had ‘won the battle’. ⁶³ Even if this author was sceptical about the use of computers, computing and operations research remained firmly on the agenda of the Institute of National Planning’s training programmes.

A closer look at the experts and publications connected with the Egyptian Institute of National Planning reveals that relations between the international organizations and the planners were not always a one-way street. The institute’s task was to assemble a range of ideas and ideologies, which were not seen as exclusive but rather could be combined as the Egyptian planners saw fit. The Egyptian institute therefore furthers our understanding of Cold War and development policies from the ‘receiving end’. ⁶⁴ It also makes clear that education moved to the centre, in terms not only of its expanding to new sections of the population, but also of the concrete allocation of different educational levels and specializations needed. Even if the method of arriving at such calculations could be a matter of dispute, there was a broad consensus on the need for, and possibility of, reliable manpower predictions. Whether policy makers perceived or used these statistics as fact or fantasy is not entirely clear. But the material shows that, early computing devices and statistics became central tools for instance in making the detailed manpower projections needed for such planning schemes. It also demonstrates how such techniques were used to make change visible, transform the future into numbers, and suggest certainty and predictability.

The concentration on education and manpower in development planning was not specific to Egypt. A short comparison with the Indian case can serve as an illustration before we return to the loftier level of debates in international organizations. In the first Indian five-year plan (1951–6), knowledge and education had not played a central role. But in 1956 a cabinet committee on manpower and a directorate of manpower were established, complemented by a division of scientific and technical manpower and manpower officers were designated in various ministries at the central and state levels. ⁶⁵ This shift maps quite clearly onto the more general findings outlined above.

Beyond the specific plans, the focus on manpower and education for development in India connected with the envisaged future role of knowledge more generally. For the Indian planner and head of the Perspective Planning Division, Pitambar Pant, ‘modern civilization’ was inextricably linked with ‘the widespread use of science and technology’ and the higher living standards in western countries were ‘directly attributable’ to technological knowledge. It was the fact that such knowledge could be used to increase production and to improve living standards that provided countries such as India ‘with their hope and opportunity to catch up with the industrially advanced countries’. ⁶⁶ Pitambar Pant referred to India’s third development plan (1961–66) which was tasked to develop not only the natural resources and industry of India, but also its ‘human resources’ through the application of knowledge and technology. ⁶⁷

In India and Egypt as well as in other contexts in the late 1960s, the practice of planning came under scrutiny. In Egypt as in other postcolonial states, in the long term, the planning effort did not reap the harvest expected or at least projected. To come back to Pitirim Sorokin’s critique of statistics, in the case of the elaborate educational projections the results achieved clearly did not coincide with those foreseen. What is more, it is difficult to determine whether the economic growth that did occur in the early 1960s could be attributed to planning. The Syrian secession from the United Arab Republic in 1961 dealt a blow to the most exuberant visions of the future. The 1967 defeat by Israel marked the end of Nasser’s pan-Arab and nationalist ideals. ⁶⁸ These changing international configurations were also reflected in social and economic policies. Population growth and an increasingly disillusioned youth moved the problem of the future of education more and more clearly into the limelight.

Beyond Egypt and India, this changed perception of the relationship between the present and the future also became marked. By the 1970s the future was no longer seen as malleable, as it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Still, in a transformed constellation, planning, and more particularly a concern with educational planning, endured, as did a belief in the need for experts and expertise. These transformations were partly linked to conceptions of a post-industrial or knowledge society. US sociologists such as Fritz Machlup and Daniel Bell translated the human capital and manpower approaches conceived by economists and distributed by organizations such as the ILO, the OECD, the IIEP or the Institute of National Planning in Egypt, into broader social analyses. ⁶⁹

One of the most widely circulated of these analyses was Daniel Bell’s Notes on the Post-industrial Society published in 1967. Touching on several of the elements discussed above, he famously described how an economy was transformed into a service economy in which a new kind of knowledge was central: ‘if the dominant figures of the past hundred years have been the entrepreneur, the businessman, and the industrial executive, the “new men” are the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists, and the engineers of the new computer technology.’ ⁷⁰

When Bell was writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the positive attitude towards straightforward educational planning had disappeared ‘as a result of the burgeoning costs of higher education and the increasing difficulties graduates are having in finding suitable jobs’. ⁷¹ Instead of needing educated manpower, many developing states, including those in the Middle East, now had large numbers of unemployed or underemployed graduates. Experts assessed educational systems as being too complex for simplified social science models and forecasting. Rather than seeking overall planning, some argued, it was necessary to work with the existing system. The comparison of two OECD conferences, in 1961 and 1970, serves well to illustrate this disillusionment. The first conference voiced agreement that if only growing demand could be satisfied in terms of university and school enrolments, buildings and teachers, this would do the trick. ⁷² By 1970, the OECD’s view had shifted, and the belief that social science could translate into social and educational planning in the same way as advances in medicine could improve health services, was shattered. This disappointment was particularly directed at those social scientists lauded by Nasser and others in the late 1950s: ‘there have undoubtedly been advances in the social science base of planning, but at the same time, an increasing scepticism concerning the adequacy of this base’, which often neglected the political interests behind changes in the educational system. ⁷³

In the light of a more general wave of disenchantment and the global politicization of university students around 1968, many experts shared the feeling that the strategies of the early 1960s were inadequate for a rapidly changing world. This was reflected in a wealth of publications and reports. ⁷⁴ The director of the IIEP, Philip Coombs, himself wrote a book The World Educational Crisis, published in 1968, in which he stated:

The assumption is that the educational system will produce the kinds and amounts of human resources required for the economy’s growth and that the economy will in fact make good use of these resources. But suppose the opposite happens? Suppose the educational system turns out the wrong ‘mix' of manpower? Or suppose it turns out the right mix, but the economy does not use it well? What then? ⁷⁵

Coombs’ contribution came in the wake of a larger IIEP conference on the ‘World Crisis in Education’ held in 1967 with the aim of proposing new answers to the finding that the expansion of education had simply led neither to higher productivity nor to democratization. Describing the phenomenon of ‘educational inflation’ in a report on the conference, Frank Bowles, the Ford Foundation’s Education Division Programme Director, illustrated an important shift in vocabulary, writing in a more careful manner about steps rather than planning. ⁷⁶

Besides the fear of producing too many graduates in the wrong fields, a further feeling in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that knowledge was becoming outdated more quickly than ever before. This led the IIEP conference to the recommendation of a lengthening time of common education, as the amount of ‘basic’ knowledge had simply grown. While in the nineteenth century four years had sufficed, compulsory schooling had been increased to eight by the 1960s. With the rate of knowledge increase in mind, Frank Bowles from the Ford Foundation projected another 50 per cent increase to 14 years by the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century. ⁷⁷ This understanding of a diminished shelf-life for knowledge was also reflected in statements by René Maheu, general-director of UNESCO, who stressed population growth, ‘the speed at which certain knowledge becomes outdated and technical process advances’ and the political emancipation of the colonies as the fundamental shifts of his time. ⁷⁸ Philip Coombs’, Frank Bowles’ and René Maheu’s assessments reveal that for them, the world could no longer be perceived as neatly planned or plannable.

Yet despite this shift in perspective, the languages of planning and of human resources and manpower did not disappear. Rather, they were rather complemented by an emphasis on questions of speed and scarcity. Bell went beyond the view of knowledge as a central resource stressing a new kind of knowledge, which was partly shaped by the tendency to forecast: ‘men now seek to anticipate change, measure the course of its direction and its impact, control it, and even shape it for predetermined ends.’ ⁷⁹ For Bell and others, planning in the widest sense was thus an essential part of the new post-industrial society, even if it seemed less straightforward and its tools needed to be revisited. In line with Daniel Bell, authors such as Frederick Harbison, professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, although admitting that statistics (and other social science approaches for that matter) raised more questions than they answered, argued that human resources were ‘the wealth of nations’ and a country failing to ‘develop the skills and knowledge of its people and to utilize them effectively’ would fail to achieve any development at all. ⁸⁰

If the social science tools were regarded with greater scepticism, the sense of crisis and urgency resulted not in a dismantling of planning discourses but in their transformation. ⁸¹ The failure of education policies seemed to many the product of too little rather than too much planning – if the planners had failed they simply had to try harder. The training industry for educational planners, for instance, continued to flourish. The London University’s Institute of Education (IOE) introduced a training course for educationalists on ‘Educational Planning and Development in Low Income Countries’ in the early 1970s. The Egyptian Institute of National Planning also experienced a strong urge towards reorganization and returned to its original broad outlook concerned with the ‘mobilization, allocation and effective utilization of human, financial and material resources’. ⁸² Training courses on educational planning were therefore available concurrently in Cairo and Beirut, at the IIEP headquarters in Paris, several UN Institutions and the London University’s Institute of Education, or in development departments at Oxford and Cambridge. ⁸³ The broader curricula of the courses however also showed that the belief in simple solutions for large-scale problems had passed and had given way to more cautious, multi-level approaches.

Many, therefore, saw the crisis in education as the result of a lack of planning, and not as proof of the failure of planning per se, with an unplanned expansion of education leading to a large, overqualified work force and therefore to ‘tremendous waste’. ⁸⁴ In the field of education, the end of the 1960s thus ushered in not the end of planning, but a new debate on the right kind of planning and a criticism of the ‘unplanned’ situation of educational expansion, which had actually unfolded during the heyday of planning. Increasingly, the speed of learning and knowledge acquisition came to be seen as a central factor in a world where knowledge multiplied and became outdated even before new programmes – at the level both of the education of planners and of educational planning – could be implemented. Planning was now less about a future that could be optimized than a future that could be tamed, or at least kept under control.

The training centres and clearing houses at the centre of this article are especially well suited for showing how expertise in the field of educational planning was assembled and disassembled. They qualify depictions of a one-way street, with development ideas leaving the US, Europe and the Soviet Union and arriving relatively unscathed at their destinations in the ‘Third World’. Revealing more complex trajectories of knowledge dissemination, the experts at the Egyptian Institute of National Planning combined expertise, advice and funding from US foundations, international organizations, the Soviet Union, East European countries such as the GDR and postcolonial states such as India. Without dismissing the political agenda attached to grants from the Ford Foundation, for instance, this article has teased out a ‘pick-and-mix attitude’ on the part of Egyptian officials and specialists when it came to acquiring Cold War funding and expertise.

Without exaggerating the actual choices these experts were offered, this perspective presents a way of inserting the agency of local decision-makers into a history of the Cold War. ⁸⁵ Very often, as in the case of Abdel Aziz El Koussy and Ibrahim Helmi Abdel Rahman, the planning professionals that this approach put into the limelight wore different hats at the same time, as social science experts, politicians and representatives of international organizations. They moved between different worlds and contributed to the circulation of planning expertise between the national and the international realms. They shared their expertise at conferences and drew on different case studies, not just from Europe and the US but most notably from countries of the global south.

Through its focus on the Egyptian Institute of National Planning, this article therefore sheds light on Cold War politics and ‘third world’ perspectives from an unusual angle, highlighting changing narratives about a post-industrial world. The knowledge and expertise disseminated from this and other similar institutes illustrate the complementary roles of the US and the Soviet Union and the importance of ‘second-rank’ actors such as the GDR during this period of the Cold War. Whereas arms sales might have been a barometer of variable and volatile relationships, accepting grants and expert knowledge was not an exclusive matter either. These exchanges illustrate the wide variety of ‘south-south connections’ particularly well, allowing a new perspective on Egypt’s role in the Cold War.

By associating education with planning, this article has made clear that in a Cold War context, education mattered beyond the question of political propaganda and cultural diplomacy. ⁸⁶ This is not to argue that education replaced, or was more important than, agricultural, industrial and infrastructural investments in this phase of development planning, but rather that the ubiquitous concern with education, manpower and human resources needs to be placed side by side with these other fields. The shift of perspective from the development of the physical world (targeting agriculture and infrastructure or health and hygiene) to the development of the inner life of people also reveals how postcolonial education policies sat uneasily between individual empowerment, propaganda and the optimization of human capital.