Schooling Is Not Education!

Lant Pritchett, Rukmini Banerji & Charles Kenny:

For the last ten years, the major focus of the global education community has been on getting children into school. And that effort has been a success: most of the world's children live in countries on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary completion by 2015.

But behind that progress is a problem--one that grows with each additional child that walks through the classroom door. Some children in those classes are learning nothing. Many more are learning a small fraction of the syllabus. They complete primary school unable to read a paragraph, or do simple addition, or tell the time. They are hopelessly ill-equipped for secondary education or almost any formal employment. The crisis of learning is both deep and widespread. It is a crisis for children, too many of whom leave school believing they are failures. And it is a crisis for their communities and countries, because economic analysis suggests it is what workers know--not their time in school--that makes them more productive and their economies more prosperous.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 5, 2013 12:30 AM
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