Justice & Law Quote by Abdoulaye Wade

“Education for all” is usually sold as moral progress, a clean slogan with no losers. Wade’s line punctures that comfort by treating mass schooling as a political technology: distributive justice, administered at scale, justified in the aggregate, and indifferent to the person standing in front of the classroom. The bite is in “in no way related to the individual,” which reads less like a rejection of equality than a warning about how equality gets operationalized.

As a statesman from Senegal who governed amid the postcolonial push for nation-building and international development benchmarks, Wade is speaking from inside the machinery. Universal education is a favored metric for governments and donors alike because it’s countable: enrollments, graduation rates, literacy targets. That quantifiability invites a particular kind of justice - one that moves resources across populations while flattening the messy realities of students: language, region, disability, poverty, the difference between attendance and learning.

The subtext is a critique of bureaucratic virtue. When schooling becomes a distributive entitlement, it can be implemented as standardized access rather than tailored formation. You build schools, you fill seats, you declare success. Meanwhile, the “individual” disappears: the child who learns in Wolof but is tested in French, the rural student for whom a “free” education still costs transport and time, the teenager tracked into a curriculum designed for labor market optics rather than personal growth.

Wade’s intent is political realism with a sting: universalism is powerful, but it’s also impersonal. The danger isn’t that education is shared; it’s that the sharing becomes an alibi for not seeing who it’s failing.