[From the Richard Rohr Publication, Radical Grace’]
Imagine that the entire population of children aged six to 14 in Europe and North America do not go to school, but stay at home or work. The figure seems incredible, yet that is the fate of an equivalent number of children of primary school age in developing countries.
Imagine also that one in four adults in Britain can not read or write, and the number is increasing. There would be demands for the government to spend money-any amount of money-to make good the education deficit with the rest of the world. But in developing countries a quarter of adults-are illiterate and there is no sign of anyone producing the funds needed for teachers, books, desks and school buildings let alone a computer in every class.
Education is neither a luxury nor a privilege, it is a fundamental right. More than 50 years after governments everywhere signed the Declaration of Human Rights, hundreds of millions of children are being denied even the most basic schooling. Education is the key to bridging the widening gulf between rich and poor. Achieving this goal means modest amounts of extra money from the rich countries of the north. It means ring-fencing of education budgets by the World Bank and the IMF. And it means that developing countries change their policies, making education a higher priority than guns and tanks.
Ending this situation would require money but not-when put into context-all that much. Universal primary education would cost $8 billion ( £5 billion) a year-roughly what the world spends on arms every four days and half what US parents spend on toys for their children annually.
There are those, however, who say the money cannot be afforded. That is certainly not a sentiment that would be shared in Sierra Leone, where in the last decade tens of thousands of children mutilated and killed other children in a civil war which most outsiders saw as baffling, and where a shaky peace is being imposed at a great price by Nigeria and the United Nations. Nor in Pakistan or the Ivory Coast, where late last year a merry-go-round of thieving civilian governments was ended abruptly by army officers.
Democracy failed spectacularly and in full view of the outside world in these three cases, but it is failing too on every continent in an unseen drama linked to intolerable poverty levels. Behind all this lies one overwhelming cause: the crisis in education, which many governments are reluctant to admit.
In the developed north there is no such reluctance. “Education, education, education” may have been a catch phrase coined by Tony Blair, but the sentiment would be shared by any government in Europe or North America.
The equation is simple: the successful parts of modern economies are based on knowledge, and that means quality education. British schools are expected to achieve literacy and numeracy targets.
The people who are denied education will have their human potential destroyed. They will be extremely poor, usually unhealthy, and will die decades earlier than the rest of us. They and their children will be open to the grossest forms of exploitation in a world where the educated have no excuse for not knowing what is happening elsewhere. In Congo, Angola, Sudan, Liberia, Burundi, Burma, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and other countries there are hundreds of thousands of child soldiers or ex-soldiers marked for life; in Mauritania and Sudan slaves accept their destiny; in Asia millions of girls are effectively slaves within their families or their husbands’ families, or sold by desperate poor families as sex slaves.
Education was recognized as a basic human right 50 years ago in the UN Declaration of Human Rights; 10 years ago the world community promised primary education for all by the turn of the century and to halve adult illiteracy; five years ago the promise slipped by 15 years, to 2015. On present trends the goal will slip again, or be quietly forgotten as unrealistic idealism. But this is short-termism of the worst sort. The vicious cycle of ignorance, poverty and civil strife means that the world is a more unstable place, that potential markets are closed off to western firms, and that the number of refugees and economic migrants will increase.
Moreover, it doesn’t have to be this way. Trend is not destiny, and the vicious cycle between lack of education, poverty and instability for these people can be broken. Last year the Guardian joined forces with the mass international public campaign to free poor countries from debt. The success of that campaign showed how public opinion could sway even the most indifferent governments into action.
Today we launch a new campaign to end the most powerful cause of global poverty, inequality and instability: the right to education. A network of organizations of teachers’ unions, women’s groups, community groups from Brazil to India, South Africa to Bangladesh, with Oxfam and ActionAid in this country are already lobbying hard to get firm commitments to making 2015 a real goal and not just another broken promise.
The campaign needs resources, but it needs political will even more. It will mean a change in priorities from many actors: governments in the developing world, the western financial institutions and donor countries which follow their lead rather than set their own priorities.
The Guardian backs the Global Plan of Action (GAP) proposed by Oxfam and its partners in the developing world as the foundation for the Dakar meeting. Governments in the north would provide an extra $4 billion a year through aid and debt relief, while developing countries could match that by diverting military and other wasteful spending to basic education.
For Africa, the continent worst affected by the education crisis, the GAP will include a Compact to provide $2 billion of the $3.6 billion needed to finance education for all in the region. But Africa will have to cut its $7 billion a year spending on arms to train enough new teachers to allow class sizes to be cut from, say, 80 to 40 pupils, and provide children with at least pencils and notebooks.
National plans in the developing world would allow monitoring of governments ‘ shifting priorities or persistent failure. There are vast opportunities for change. In Pakistan, for instance, there are 11 million children out of school, yet the government spends six times as much on the military as on primary education, and the country has nuclear weapons which have set off a dangerous arms race in the region.
In countries as different as Brazil, Chad and the Philippines, governments skew education resources towards higher education, where they benefit the wealthy, rather than towards basic education for the poor. Regional differences in spending are often dramatic: in Brazil, for instance, the desperately poor northeast ranks on a par with Mozambique, while the richer south ranks with South Korea.
A commitment to changing attitudes will have to come too from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Despite the verbal commitment to end poverty by boosting basic education, both institutions are advocates of cost-recovery-a euphemism for transferring financial responsibilities from governments to families. Cost-recovery means some of the world’s poorest are asked to pay for their children’s education. Many cannot afford to do so, and school enrollment rates have dropped in numerous African countries, such as Tanzania and Kenya.
Girls are falling further behind than ever, despite the known links between girls’ education and the future health and productivity of their families. South Asia and Africa, with the biggest gaps between girls’ and boys’ enrollment, maintain this barrier to development at their peril.
In the 21st century the growth of technology and knowledge-based economies will bring a wealth of opportunities, but it threatens to exclude great sections of the world’s population that don’t have the infrastructure of electricity and telephone cables on which it is based. The rest of the world owes them at least a firm commitment to primary education-now.
Illiteracy keeps poorest countries in poverty
. One in four adults in the developing world is illiterate
. Women are 60% more likely than men to be illiterate
. In Pakistan 2 in 3 adults are illiterate
. 125 million primary school-age children are not in school-two-thirds are girls
. In the 47 least developed countries nearly half the children do not go to school
. In the 1990s 16 African countries saw school enrollment drop
. In the 1980s spending on education dropped by 65% in Africa and 40% in Latin America
. 8.2 million children under 14 have lost their mother or both parents to Aids
. 7.8 million of these are in sub-Saharan Africa
. 250 million children work instead of going to school
. 50% of the rural poor live more than 10 km from a school
. In Zambia the average pupil walks 7 km to school every morning
. In parts of Egypt only 12 girls are in school for every 100 boys
. The world would need to spend an additional $8 million a year for the next 10 years to educate all children. This is less than is spent on cosmetics in the U.S. or ice cream in Europe
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000
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