GLOBAL EDUCATION DISPARITIES: BRIDGING THE LEARNING GAP WORLDWIDE

            

            In the last 200 years, the number of children attending primary school globally has grown from 2.3 million to 700 million today, covering nearly 90 percent of the world’s school-age children. But the gulf in average levels of education between rich and poor countries remains huge. Without a fundamental rethinking of current approaches to education, it’s going to take another 100 years for children in developing countries to reach the education levels achieved in developed countries. Something needs to change.

Global education enrollment and attainment: Unequal access, unequal outcomes

Who would have guessed in 1763 that the Prussian government’s decision to provide broad access to schooling would be the first step in a mass schooling movement that would spread across the globe?

(1) In the beginning of the 19th century, a sum total of 2.3 million children were enrolled in primary school around the world.

(2) Today, more than 700 million children are now enrolled in primary school, nearly 90 percent of the world’s school-age children.

The spread of schooling around the globe remains one of the most widely successful “going to scale” stories to date. Two hundred years ago, it would have been inconceivable in any country or cultural context that a central feature in a child’s upbringing and preparation for adulthood would be his or her regular participation in classroom lessons and school life. Of course, education existed long before—and indeed for millennia has been the primary way in which humans have passed down knowledge across generations—but for the vast majority of young people it took very different forms, such as through the family, songs and the arts, cultural and religious institutions, community work, and apprenticeships in arts and trades. Today, not a single country in the world is without a schooling system, and for most of the world’s youth the education they receive in school—or lack thereof—has a major bearing on their prospects in adult life.

 

 While there has been global convergence around enrolling children in primary school, stark education inequality remains between developed and developing countries. When it’s shown as an average number of years in school and levels of achievement, the developing world is about 100 years behind developed countries. These poorer countries still have average levels of education in the 21st century that were achieved in many western countries by the early decades of the 20th century. If we continue with the current approaches to education, this century-wide gap will continue into the future.

 

 The four forces behind the emergence of mass schooling

It may come as a surprise to learn that over the last 200 years, both flourishing democracies and autocratic regimes have consistently placed a great deal of importance on schooling, just as countries with robust and expanding economies invested in schooling as eagerly as countries with stagnating GDP figures.

(3) In fact, the gains in schooling from 1950 to 2010 were nearly equal between the most and least corrupt countries, the most and least democratic, and those with the largest and smallest levels of economic growth.

(4)In other words, the spread of mass schooling cannot be dismissed as merely ancillary to global economic growth or to the increasing prevalence of more representative forms of government. Instead, mass schooling has been a global movement spurred on by multiple forces, often interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Initially, the movement was kick-started by threats of military conflict in places like Prussia and Japan, and the desire among states to have a better-tooled, and hence better educated, military.

(5) The Protestant church in northern Europe was also an early proponent, recognizing that the more literate a population the more members of its flock would be able to read the Bible.

  But underlying the development of mass schooling over time, four fundamental forces stand out as having been especially influential in driving the movement: the university,the industrial revolution, nationalism, and human rights.

 

The university as knowledge holder

The role of the university in the mass schooling movement is often underappreciated. But as David Baker eloquently argues in his latest book, “The Schooled Society,” it has been fundamental in laying the groundwork for the spread of schooling.[6] The Western university, in particular, has had a profound influence on the way in which societies around the world have come to understand knowledge itself. Eight hundred years ago, when the first Western universities were established in Europe, from Paris to Bologna to Oxford, schools were not seen to be the arbiters of knowledge that they are considered to be today. However, over the centuries the idea inherent in university scholarship that knowledge and truth is open to discovery by anyone has taken hold so firmly in most places around the globe that we hardly question it anymore. Even in parts of the world where strong alternatives to this understanding exist, such as cultural or religious doctrines, they usually exist alongside each other (“traditional” sources of knowledge versus “modern” sources of knowledge, for example).

 

If we start with the premise that natural ability is evenly distributed across the globe—namely that children are on average equally smart and talented no matter where they happen to be born—the inequality we document here has everything to do with the education systems in which children find themselves learning, or not learning, as the case may be. And while communities, countries, and international bodies have agreed that high-quality education is a human right, we are failing to deliver on a promise to millions of children in the world.

 

WRITTEN BY:

NNA-WOJI BEST

OS/23B/0308