Great education scandal: around 375 million children still out of school… who is selling the world's children down the river?

New Internationalist, August, 1999 by Chris Brazier

THE child looks inquiringly up from her work, eyes bright, wide open to the message of the teacher. The image is a classic one that never fails to appeal. Send a photographer to capture the everyday life of a community in any part of the world and they will unerringly home in on a schoolroom and, whether it is stocked to the nines with computers or has no facilities at all, will take photos of children learning. They do this because they know there is a market for such images - we have an apparently insatiable thirst for these snapshots of hope and human improvement.

At the end of a century, let alone a millennium, the demand for such images is all the greater, since children inevitably become a touchstone for our hope that the future will not contain as many mistakes and wrong turnings as the past. So it is no surprise that in this last decade of the century, the political profile of education issues has steadily climbed.

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair was campaigning for election in 1997, he said famously that he had three top priorities: `Education, Education and Education'. Brazilian President Fernando Enrique Cardoso's spindoctors are clearly in the same class as Blair's: when he took office in January 1995, one of his first acts was to demonstrate that education was his top priority by teaching the first class of the year at the Jose Barbosa School in Bahia state. Meanwhile no Bill Clinton State of the Union address would be complete without a section on `raising standards' in education.

They are by no means alone in their rhetorical fervour. Back in 1990 the world's governments met at Jomtien in Thailand and, urged on by three UN agencies and the World Bank, committed themselves to the goal of `Education for All' by the year 2000.

Yet here we are, a few months from the twenty-first century, with 125 million of the world's children still deprived of any schooling, another 150 million who drop out of school without learning to read and write and the absolute number of illiterate adults still growing. All over the world, teachers' morale is low: they are overworked, under siege and, in many areas, leaving the profession in droves. For all the high-profile political pronouncements, public funds are steadily being drained from education. The state is - slowly but surely in some quarters, with rampant enthusiasm for privatization in others - withdrawing from the field.

What the hell is going on? How can there be such dissonance between what we claim to aspire to and what is actually delivered? Put more challengingly: Who Is Selling the World's Children Down the River?

Hijacked by education

This issue of the NI is an attempt to find out. Until recently I had no special interest in education; it was always one of those subjects that I cared about in the abstract, but the details and controversies of which rather passed me by. My knowledge of schools was based almost entirely on my own experience as a pupil in the 1960s and 1970s.

Predictably enough, I began to take more interest when a child of my own started school some five years ago - actually in a multicultural school in inner-city Toronto. When we returned to England, my partner launched into a career change that was to result in her teaching in a high school with a particularly difficult catchment area, full of `classic' problems of poverty and social alienation. Meanwhile my children went to the local school, SS Mary and John in East Oxford. Eventually, hoping to do what I could to help and improve it, I joined its governing body - in England, as in ever-increasing numbers of countries, the responsibility for overseeing schools has been largely devolved to such bodies of volunteers. This turned out to be more of a commitment than I had bargained for - I am now chair of governors, a post which, as you might imagine, people do not exactly clamour to take on.

Then, last year, I was commissioned by UNICEF to research and write a report on education worldwide. By the end of the contract I knew more than I will probably ever wish to know again about, say, how a project in Alice Springs which teaches Aboriginal children in their own language, Arrernte, has inspired teachers working with ethnic minorities in the hills of Vietnam.

In other words, my whole life suddenly seems to have been hijacked by education. This issue of the NI tries to take advantage of that by using my experience helping to run an inner-city multicultural school in the rich world - while at the same time harnessing the detailed knowledge of education in developing countries that I picked up while working for UNICEF. These two worlds actually fit together in many different places. I was fascinated, while researching the UNICEF report, to discover that many of the educational issues that we are wrestling with at grassroots level in Britain, far from being the result of one government's idiocy or intransigence, are actually the local playing-out of international trends.

Take the very practice of `local management of schools' which has left me, a volunteer with no expertise or relevant experience, with the overall responsibility for managing the finances and hiring or firing staff at my children's school. Britain was one of the first countries to start off down this road, driven by the reforming zeal of Margaret Thatcher, whose desire for greater national control of the curriculum and whose belief in `parent power' led her to attack local education authorities from both sides.