There were also qualitative aspects to the transformations in the education system. The educational project of independent Mozambique intended not only to broaden access, but also to expand the educational experience of the national liberation struggle. School for all should contribute to rescuing the dignity of the Mozambican people, valuing their culture and their history. It should be a privileged social space for the formation of the nation, cultivating national identity and national unity.

The alterations undertaken in the education system have allowed Mozambican children, youths and adults to be able to study the history and geography of their own country, rather than the history and geography of the colonial metropolis. In this sense, education played, in this period, an important role in creating and developing a national awareness.

As a space for promoting knowledge, the school in all its levels and branches bore the responsibility of ensuring access to the accumulated technical and scientific knowledge of humanity, as a fundamental and decisive instrument in the fight against misery, a condition sine qua non for the promotion of development.

New forms of management that implied the involvement and participation of pupils, teachers and the community in the life of the school were introduced. It was intended that the school should be a centre of democratic learning, where all were called upon to discuss and take part in the solution of problems. These aims and objectives frequently clashed with authoritarian educational practices and school management.

Throughout the country initiatives and experiences of interaction between schools and communities appear ed but often did not have enough continuity to become consolidated. Sometimes this relationship was limited to the work which communities undertook in building and cleaning schools. But there were few schools which turned the relationship with their respective communities into moments for mutual learning.

It is important to note that this effort to make education a mass phenomenon had its ups and downs. On the one hand, the nationalisation of education did establish the conditions for eliminating social and racial discrimination, and to broaden access. But on the other , it led to statist management of the educational system, and provoked a cooling of the impetus of popular participation which had marked the initial years of independence.

The question that may be posed is: if the objective of this whole effort was to expand access and establish a bridge between modernity and culture, what then explains this slowdown? There are several reasons.

Adopting the political and scientific ideology of modernity in practice ended up by making the relationship between modern education and traditional education complicated and difficult. Throughout the history of post-independence education it is difficult to find examples in the schools of interaction and dialogue between the logic of modernity and that of tradition on a footing of equality.

Mozambican educators and leaders always stressed the need to insert the school, socially and culturally, in the community. However, 25 years after independence, Mozambican schools in general remain without roots in the communities where they are physically located. The local population, particularly the peasants, still regard schools as something strange, in that they transmit world visions and values that are very different from their own thinking (Khoi, 1990: 328), and make little contribution to the transformation of their lives.

So it is not strange that, despite a great deal of effort and a few good experiences, schools remain alien, and in many cases foreign, to communities. If they formally accept the school, this is because the fact of schooling is a condition and pre-requisite for hypothetical social mobility and status, which ends up educating new generations outside of their culture and community in terms of attitudes, practices and values instead of doing the reverse.

As mentioned above, the school/education was slotted into the ideology of modernity, which gives to science and technology the mission of freeing humanity and societies from the darkness of obscurantism. But this option, as it was and is interpreted, ended up sustaining practices that marginalise the culture of the majority of Mozambican communities that the school should serve, thus widening the chasm that separates the "modern" and "traditional" sectors of society.

Furthermore, the objectives of education and the working methods in the schools were based on educational experiences developed during the liberation struggle. One of their basic goals was to create within the pupils the love of their country and to develop their political awareness, that is, their sense of responsibility towards the common good (Buendia, 1997: 352).

But these noble intentions rested on the fragile premise that the educational experience of the liberated areas, very localised and conditioned by the dynamic of the liberation war, could be transferred to the entire country by decree. This theoretical and practical assumption was, in large measure, a result of the voluntarist attitude that was highly generalised at the time, and drew its inspiration from the radical nature of the social transformations under way.