Student tour-guides at Yale often tell visitors about the university's origins and how it started as an inconspicuous endeavor in the history-rich Connecticut Hall. But in the decades that followed, Yale's faculty rapidly expanded as did post-secondary education across the nation and the world. Today, new colleges spring up annually and the number of degree-seeking students is steadily climbing, at least in the Western Hemisphere. In less affluent nations, education is not always a top priority and schoolhouses, staffed by the few literate members of a village, are isolated and in desperate need of funding and guidance. With the advent of new technologies and the internet, education has become more dispensable and affordable, but the gap between the formally educated and barely literate is alarmingly wide.
One of the key questions regarding education that world leaders face is what role the government should play. Some states such as France and India traditionally maintain education systems at the federal level, while the American constitution devolved this control to states. In developing regions of the world, NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) have proved more effective than the government when it comes to establishing and maintaining schools.
For example, in Nepal, less than 30% of primary school age children enroll in state-provided primary school and 50% of those enrolled drop out before the fifth grade. Nepalese families complain that the teaching is shoddy and impractical. Fortunately, NGOs in Nepal have set up "Community Learning and Development Systems" in each village, where teachers interact with their students to find out which trades they are interested in and then proceed to set up individualized education plans to develop specific conversational skills that would help them in those jobs. These loose networks have names ranging from the "Horticulture Group" to the "Fish Raising Group", and while they are still "non-formal" forms of education, they're quite effective in career-training (which some argue should be the consummate goal of education itself). International organizations (also called INGOs) such as Save the Children have also claimed stakes in Nepalese education. But before 1990, these NGOs were ineffective because they competed with the Panchyat Regime which sought to control schools. After the regime was toppled, a sufficient balance has been achieved between the public and private sector when it comes to education. Some developing nations have not found this harmony yet. Mali, for example, turns down offers from numerous INGOs to intervene in their floundering primary education system. It's unclear whether this struggle between states and NGOs is an issue of pride or political legitimacy. Should governments be able to dictate how its people acquire literacy or career skills?
The United Nations believes that existing political frameworks can bridge the gap between barely literate and PhD-producing nations. 192 member nations and at least 23 other international organizations signed the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, the second of which is to "achieve universal primary education". Target 2A reads as follows: "Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling." But while this goal seems straight-forward, its implementation has been anything but.
The Fast Track Initiative, established in 2002, made the World Bank the official bursar for meeting this MDG. But earlier this year, Oxfam International announced that the FTI has failed to help the 70 plus million children across the world who lack primary education. Member nations have fallen short on their aid commitments and the US government, a main source of funding, withheld aid for countries such as countries such as Yemen for security reasons. Oxfam endorses the idea of a Global Fund for Education in lieu of a system bogged down by red tape and World Bank precautions. It seems that bureaucracy often hinders educational progress in third-world nations, where NGOs can help jumpstart schools and make a big difference. But if governments won't welcome these organizations, how can change be initiated?
In my opinion, education is one of those delicate things that should be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Having lived on three continents, I've sampled China's state-run education system, Sweden's effective free-market, and the U.S.'s hybrid federal-state approach. All three have their respective merits and downfalls and I consider myself extremely lucky to be at Yale, receiving the highest quality post-secondary education. But for my 6-year-old brother, who is autistic and has an Individualized Education Plan, finding the proper fit is much more frustrating. In his case, "No Child Left Behind" isn't quite so ideal and my parents have bemoaned the one-size-fits-all standards-based systems in elementary schools.
The goal of this blog is to explore education in its myriad forms across the world. Primary, secondary, post-secondary, special, remedial, alternative, indigenous are just some of the many tags affixed to the shapeless instituation of education, whose problems must be addressed. Addressing the problems in global education starts with, well, education-informing and inciting into action those who are more capable of bringing about change.
Photo Cred: United Nations Development Programme, Int.
Caption: This Millenium Development Goal has proved to be one of the most ambitious and difficult.