EDUCATION: Differing Views on Progress in Education

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Alejandro Kirk

AMMAN, Jun 19 1996 (IPS) - There has been progress in making basic education possible for people throughout the world but problems remain in furthering the aim of “Education for All”, delegates at an international conference agreed Wednesday.

A mid-decade meeting of the International Consultative Forum on Education for All (EFA) brought together more than 200 education officials – including 30 ministers or deputy ministers – from around the globe to review the progress made since the first conference, held in Indonesia, in March 1990.

At the final session. a gap between donors and developing countries opened on the question of furthering educational aims with delegates from the South stressing economic and financial hardships. Donors, on the other hand, pushed the need for national plans, new partnerships with the private sector and a re- allocation of budgetary funds.

While illiteracy in the developing world has decreased since 1990, and less children are out of school, delegates underlined the fact that women and girls still faced discrimination in the access to education and that the conference had not properl;y focused on the problem of adult illiteracy.

“Figures may be very good on paper, but they look different on the ground,” said Ugandan Vice President, Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe, the highest-ranked official attending the conference.

Kazibwe, along with delegates from Brazil and Pakistan, underlined the shortcomings of traditional basic education in providing skills for survival in adverse economic conditions, such as those presently experienced in most developing countries.

“In my country, the illiterate are better-off in surviving because learning the alphabet and how to add one-plus-one does not provide people with the skill to make potatoes grow. Literacy means very little when you don’t have two meals a day,” Kazibwe, a soft- spoken medical doctor, observed.

“People’s problems are simple. If you bring sophisticated answers to them, they become sophisticated and expensive, but answers are not expensive as they are made out in conferences.”

Pakistani government official, Shehnaz Wazir Ali, said: “With the globalization of the new international order and the establishment of WTO (World Trade Organization), our governments are compelled to make financial decisions noy always favorable to education, health, women, children or minorities.”

She reminded delegates that while just six billion dollars are required to put all children of the world into school, more than one trillion dollatrs is spent on defence worldwide.

In the current economic international arena, Wazir Ali added, only more suffering can be expected, because “the playing field is not equal” for developing and developed countries.

World Bank vice president Armeane Choksi, however, said international financial instituions had not forced developing countries to cut their spending in education and health while advancing structural adjustment programs.

“Quite the opposite,” Choksi told IPS. “It is World Bank policy to advise countries not to cut social services when balancing financial budgets.”

Since the Indonesian meeting, Brazil has achieved “political and social commitment to basic education, but we have to become accountable by way of monitoring learning achievements”, said Edson de Souza, cabinet chief at the Brazilian ministry of Education.

The main shortcoming of literacy programs, he said, is that they fail to provide skills to bring immediate benefit to students.

Uganda’s Kazibwe said figures looked fine when referred to children. But the goal set in Indonesia in 1990 of providing “education for all by the year 2000 might now seem unreachable, considering that 960 million people aged 15 to 65 still are illiterate – and that two-thirds of them are women.”

And, why should be adults interested in literacy anyway, when it does not reflect any change in their day-to-day lives?

Such questions, Kazibwe said, are crucial, particularly when referring to women, who ough to be the main target of revised education programs, aimed at providing skills for survival, such as agricultural techniques.

“We talk about women in every conference, because people sense that is politically correct, but not many people do enough about them. They know what to do, but they are not doing enough,” she said in reference to decision-makers both in developed, and developing, countries.