The December 1960 UNESCO General Conference was full of new faces. That year, the famous “Year of Africa,” 17 new countries had joined the organization. At the meeting, these new countries along with the rest of the members unanimously passed resolution 1.2322, in which the General Conference placed “on record its conviction that the most urgent and vital need in Africa today is education.” That resolution marked a moment of enormous consequence for African history. Local resources and foreign aid were mobilized on an unprecedented scale to address Africa’s “most urgent and vital need.” The result was that the 1960s, in most African countries, was the decade during which going to school became an expectation rather than an exception. Focusing on the highpoint of African decolonization, this talk examines how the emergence of development economics, and in particular the sub-field of human capital theory, powered twentieth century Africa’s most significant social change.