EDUCATION-POLAND: Stock Taking On Basic Education Provision

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yojana Sharma

WARSAW, Feb 4 2000 (IPS) - Delegates from some 40 countries, including ministers of education and social affairs, gather in the Polish capital this Sunday to take stock of basic education provision in Europe over the last decade.

The three-day meeting, held under the auspices of various United Nations organisations, is one of several regional conferences being held in Africa, Asia, Europe and America. These are part of the assessment recommended by the World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990.

At Jomtien, some 155 countries committed themselves to providing their citizens with universal primary education and to substantially reduce illiteracy by the end of the decade.

The results of the regional assessments will be presented to the World Education Forum to be held in Dakar, Senegal, in April.

Conference organisers, told a press briefing Friday, that the entire education system of Eastern and Central Europe has been “brutally shaken by the economic crisis gripping the region”.

Basic education remains, more or less, accessible to all, but its quality and functioning have been critically affected since Communism was abandoned at the beginning of the last decade.

“Under Communism, quality free education was a major success throughout the region. This is why its decline is all the more difficult to accept today,” notes the regional report “Education for All?” produced by the UN Children’s Fund UNICEF.

In several countries, teachers are left unpaid for months at a time. In Bulgaria, Lithuania and Moldovia, salaries in general have fallen to one-third of the 1990 level. And the cost of education, even when comparatively low, is higher than most poor families can afford.

Only the children of well-to-do parents now benefit from advantages which were previously free and available to all.

In Russia teachers remain unpaid for upto 10 months and their salaries are among the lowest of any professional category so that they are obliged to find a second job to make ends meet.

“Consequently they no longer have enough time to guarantee quality education, ” says the report.

Many teachers are leaving the profession. The recruitment of future teachers may soon be limited to men or women who are only motivated by retirement and social benefits.

In the Balkans, the impact of war has severely disrupted the education of thousands of children. These countries have had to accommodate population movements and adapt their education systems to thousands of refugee children.

Most of the schools in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, were damaged. In Kosovo more than half the schools were substantially damaged or destroyed. A reported 668 schools needed repairs and 135 needed to be totally rebuilt. In Serbia and Vojvodine, 242 primary schools were destroyed or razed to the ground.

Meanwhile failings of basic education have been reported even in rich countries. For instance, some 25 percent of the adult population of Europe have difficulties with reading and writing.

These people are incapable of understanding and using information contained in brochures, maps, train schedules or simple instructions on household appliances. No country is immune from “functional illiteracy” as it is called.

It is one of the aims of the “Education for All” project to eliminate functional illiteracy yet only a few countries have carried out research into this problem and the statistical data needed to fully understand the extent of “functional illiteracy” is still insufficient.

However as Robert Fuderich of UNICEF noted: “It is not all gloom and doom. The conference and the Dakar meeting should be seen as a golden opportunity to improve the planning of education.”

Delegates attending the three-day conference here will draw up proposals on how to tackle the myriad problems raised by the country reports to be reviewed at Warsaw.

They will also look forward to the future challenges of how societies can gear their education systems to changes such as labour market shifts, globalisation, technical advances, such as the internet and a declining state role in education in virtually all countries of the region.