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Searching for development paths and suitable educational policies, postcolonial governments often turned to the experiences of other countries and sought to adapt these to their own contexts. Research on such processes has largely neglected the resulting entanglements between postcolonial and European socialist countries, and between different postcolonial countries. This gap in research is addressed in this article by tracing a world-spanning history of educational transfers that has its origins in the Workers' Faculties of the early Soviet Union. Workers' Faculties were established with two goals: quickly channelling members of formerly disadvantaged social groups into higher education by providing university-preparatory education to workers and peasants; and providing suitably educated cadres for the development of a socialist society. After World War 2, institutions drawing on the Soviet experiences and combining these two goals were established in European, Asian, Latin American, and African countries. Tracing the processes of transfers and local interpretations of these institutions gives insights into an entangled history of postcolonial and socialist education, but also into how tensions between education as a means to provide social equality and education as a tool for (socialist) development played out in various national contexts.

During the Cold War, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was a key player in sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on its role in the Ethiopian polytechnical education reform effort between 1977 and 1989, this study explores the extent of educational policy transfer as well as the nature and magnitude of influence during the implementation of that transfer. Based on secondary sources and in-depth interviews with former educational officials, curriculum experts, and educators in teacher training institutes and colleges, the study examines the power relations between the two cooperation partners at systemic, institutional and individual levels of interaction. Finally, the study identifies issues that provide insights for improving the historical and theoretical literature on Cold War educational policy transfers.

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Worker's Faculties, which have been widespread in the Soviet Union up until 1941, combined the two goals of preparing adult workers and peasants for university entrance through the provision of general education, as well as creating a new socialist intelligentsia from among these groups. After World War II, Workers' Faculties were also established in postcolonial countries. Based on case studies in Vietnam, Cuba, and Mozambique, we argue that corresponding transfer processes were largely driven by local actors in the respective countries and that these institutions were regarded as suitable instruments in solving problems particular to postcolonial contexts.

This article argues that the chances of successful educational upward mobility are more clearly assessed when educational decisions are interpreted not as isolated individual or family decisions, but in relation to their societal and political context. In order to do this, the authors propose a combination of Bourdieu's conception of habitus with the political process approach. In an ongoing biographical investigation concerned with first-generation students in East and West Germany, the author presents initial results which show the benefit of this theoretical concept.