Everyone Has the Right to Education
- Everyone Has the Right to Education
With flourish and fanfare the world met in 1990 and proclaimed education for all. In fact, the idea that universal access to education was in humanity’s common interest was embedded in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—“everyone has the right to education”—but let us concentrate on the recent period. Meeting again in 2000, this time in Dakar, the world’s governments, the funding and technical assistance agencies, and major nongovernmental organizations noted that the 1990 objectives had not been achieved and proceeded to reaffirm the commitment to education of good quality for all. Major elements of the education-for-all goals were subsequently incorporated into the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and targets.1
Within independent Africa, expanding access to schools and improving the quality of education have long been prominent national goals. Indeed, broader access to education was both an objective and a promise of Africa’s liberation struggles. For both individuals and the society, education was to be the vehicle for constructing the new future, developing the understandings, the skills, and equally important, the attitudes that economic, political, and social transformation required. Schools were to be places where the inequalities and inequities of the colonial past were to be addressed, where imagination, initiative, and achievement would become the primary determinants of selection and promotion. Rapidly spreading throughout the countryside, schools were also symbols of the new government’s presence [End Page 105] and accomplishments. As Coe puts it, “the projects of the nation-state and mass education have become inseparable in Africa; providing education is one of the major functions and sources of legitimacy of most national governments” (136).
Yet education for all in Africa remains a distant dream. For most, universal access to reasonable quality education remains hard to imagine. Writing about Ethiopia (though the assessment might refer to many other African countries), Tekeste Negash concludes, “the crisis of education, despite phenomenal growth in enrolment, has deepened and the education system is in fact on the verge of collapse” (8).
How to make sense of the enormous space between aspirations, assertions, and promises and outcomes? The puzzles here are both complex and important.2 The common answers—time and lack of resources, that is, poverty—are at best partial. Africa is a continent of imaginative education innovations with dramatic examples of rapid progress. Teaching basic science with no laboratories and few materials. Providing literacy programs in remote rural areas where rains make roads impassable. Linking the school experience to the productive life of the community. Enabling teachers to develop instructional materials and to learn from one another. Insisting that prospective teachers become not simply technicians of schooling but also education researchers and activists. And more. Yet few of those innovations have had a long life or have become part of the national education system. And notwithstanding many years of loudly proclaimed education reforms, new plans, and newer new plans, the education-for-all global monitoring reports regularly show that education in Africa remains sorely troubled (UNESCO 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007).3
As crisis and frustration intensified in the late twentieth century, so too did the foreign role. Where the national education budget could barely pay the teachers and purchase some pencils and chalk, educators across the continent turned to foreign aid. Accumulating debt as they struggled with the constraints of structural adjustment programs, African governments became ever more skilled at seeking and securing external support, with education as a primary focus. Previously, foreign aid had...
