Fall in number going to school

Press, 19 December 1989, Page 31

Fall in number going to school

PA Wellington The number of children attending primary school is dropping after 30 years of educational expansion, the “State of the World’s Children” report for 1990 by the United Nations Children’s Fund says. “In half the developing nations the number of six to eleven-year-olds in school is now declining and in two countries out of three, educational expenditure per pupil is falling,” the report says. The most disturbing aspect of the decline was that it was happening at the foundation of the education pyramid, primary education. “Not to acquire basic literacy and numeracy is

a serious disability for any child,” the Unicef executive director, Mr James Grant, said in a statement accompanying the report. “Somehow the momentum of education must be restored ... the failure of society to invest in education will disable, in some degree, all other development efforts.” Ways and means of reversing this trend will be the most urgent item on the agenda of the first World Conference on Education for All, meeting in Thailand in March, 1990. The report says education is feeling the squeeze from the rise in debt repayments and military

spending which now accounts for half of all government expenditures in the developing world. At the same time, education is being eroded from within by high dropout rates. For example, of the 100 million children who will begin their school careers in the developing world in 1990, over 40 million will drop-out before completing primary education, the report says. Urging action to reduce the “crushing burden of debt servicing and defence spending,” Unicef has suggested increased aid and a new priority for primary education. One experiment which may offer a way of reduc-

ing costs and expanding enrolment is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) which has opened 2500 schools so far, providing basic education for as little as $l5 annually for each pupil, the report says. Parents have built simple classrooms and educated members of the community are recruited to act as teachers. Aimed at the children of the poor and landless, the programme has been “remarkably successful” in giving three years of basic education to eight to ten-year-olds, and graduating 95 per cent of its pupils into the fourth grade of the government education system.