Monday, March 3

The education of a child starts 100 years ago

I read that quote last week and was deeply influenced and impacted by it. I have been thinking about it ever since. It makes perfect sense, what my daughter is reading now or what my son is studying now is based upon things which started centuries ago.


Then comes this article in today's FT, which I support fully. It asks for a world education bank. I quote some snippets:


Education is a well-established global development priority. This was reiterated in 2000 when, at the UN millennium summit, the goal of “universal primary education for every child” was enshrined as the second of the eight millennium development goals the international community set itself to attain by 2015. This is a goal that we are very unlikely to meet.

A World Education Bank would raise the profile of education as a development goal. Its sole purpose would be to promote education at all levels in any country that asked for help. Developing countries would be prime beneficiaries....


While the concept is too wooly at this moment and it is not clear as to how the PISA work or the UNESCO institution will work, but it is a step in the right direction. It is a severe indictment of UNESCO that it is now reduced to a bureaucracy which can easily be shut down and replaced with this nice, tight World Education Bank.

 

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