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

Yet its education minister was defeated at the polls. Small crumb of comfort this may be, but it is a sign that those two weeks of resistance in which the entire school system of the province was shut down, in which 2.1 million children and their parents were confronted daily with the key issues, still loom large in the public memory. If nothing else, this landmark strike showed that far from being `common sense', the current wave of education reforms are driven by the ideology of the Right and contested by those who know the classroom best. Ontario's teachers stood up for what they valued about public education. Sooner or later we are all going to have to do the same.

(1) EDUCO Learns and Teaches, Ministry of Education of El Salvador.

(2) K Bloomer, Decentralizing the education system, Commonwealth Secretariat Program 1991.

(3) Quoted in Barbara Miner, `For-Profit Firms Fail to Deliver', in Selling Out Our Schools, Rethinking Schools 1996.

(4) Website of the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, June 1999.

(5) Martin Carnoy, `Lessons of Chile's Voucher Reform Movement', in Selling Out Our Schools, Rethinking Schools 1996.

(6) Background paper for the NI, June 1999.