Why is education important?

Imagine abandoned children or demobilized boy soldiers, with little or no schooling, living on the street, without work or safe shelter.

Imagine sick babies, dying because their mothers cannot read the prescription on the medicine bottle, or a farmer, losing his ancestral land because he cannot read the legal documents.

Basic education is, and always has been, the key to freedom from subjugation, fear and want. Education is an effective weapon to fight poverty. It saves lives and gives people the chance to improve their lives. It gives people a voice. And it increases a nations' productivity and competiveness, and is instrumental for social and political progress.

 What is basic education

Basic education is more than just learning how to read, write and calculate. It encompasses the broadest possible sense of learning -- formal, non-formal and informal -- and at any stage of life. Learning takes place in and out of school -- in the home, the local community, the workplace, and in recreational and other settings. Not confined to childhood and the formative years, it extends from infancy throughout the whole of life.

What exactly does basic education mean? Basic refers to the competencies, knowledge, attitudes, values and motivations that are deemed necessary in order for people to become fully literate and to have developed the educational foundations for a lifelong learning journey.

Basic education is not a fixed or clear-cut concept and most countries have chosen to restrict 'basic' to primary schooling, meaning the first stage of formal schooling. 'Basic', in an increasing number of countries, however, now encompasses junior secondary schooling and in other it extends to a full secondary education. China, for example, is shifting the focus for much of the country from the primary school to the nine years compulsory school, preceded by a variety of early childhood care and education programmes. In Brazil, a law adopted in 1996 defined the whole system from day care provision to the end of secondary schooling as 'basic'. Throughout Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and parts of South East Asia, 'basic' includes both primary and secondary levels.

Shifting the focus from quantity to quality

Education for all is not the same thing as quality education for all. Today, it is widely agreed that it is not enough to put children into school, they also have to learn something relevant and stay in school.

Most countries, including countries with large populations such as Bangladesh, Brazil, China and Mexico, are now talking about quality, a concept that covers everything from the physical condition of schools to better teacher training, from the availability of textbooks to more parental involvement.

The need for improving the efficiency of education systems is urgent. Today, in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa less than three out of four pupils reach fifth grade. In terms of measuring efficiency, their school systems are wasting up to a third of their resources on repeaters and drop-outs. In fact, a quarter of the 96 million pupils who entered school for the first time in 1995 are likely to abandon their schooling before fifth grade. By failing to be sensitive to the needs of many ordinary and low-achieving pupils, schools cease to be truly open and accessible to all.

There are several reasons for this. In many countries education systems have been slow to adapt to economic crises and other factors that erode quality. What is being taught in school is not always relevant any more. When education programmes exist out of context, without a bearing on the surrounding job market, or on the local culture, sooner or later they lose their "clients".

Finally, many external factors influence the quality of education, not least the pupils' social status and state of health. Quality education is not only about having good quality teachers and materials. It is also about the quality of learners. Children need to be healthy, well-nourished and ready to learn.

Excluded children and youth

Today, 113 million children, most of them girls, are excluded from education. 100 million of them live in developing nations. An excluded child might be a boy from a South American hill tribe recruited into a militia, or a girl who is a sex worker in an Asian slum. But these, like street children, are at the extreme end of the scale. In other cases the reasons for exclusion may be more mundane but the effect is just as pernicious, such as an African child, usually a girl, kept at home to tend crops, fetch water or look after younger siblings.

A tangled web of socio-cultural, economic and physical factors excludes children from education. Schools exclude when they do not welcome families as partners: the education bureaucracy excludes by failing to adequately support teachers; and governments exclude by failing to pursue pro-child policies. As Governments have been slow to embrace non-formal education, non-governmental organizations provide most of the schooling to children in need. But for real advances to be made, more effective partnerships between non-governmental organizations and Governments must be built.

Reaching children on the margins of society is a difficult and costly task which needs to be tackled with imagination.

Today’s excluded children become tomorrow’s marginalized youth. Many unreached children enter adolescence unequipped with the basic skills necessary to fully join society. At over one billion, there are more young people aged between 15 and 24 in the world than there have ever been – and the numbers are growing.

Marginalization is not confined to youth in developing countries. Youth unemployment and other forms of social exclusion have reached high levels in the world’s major industrialized countries. In France, where the young have been called "la génération salle d’attente", or the waiting-room generation, one youth in four is unemployed. Over the past decade, new solutions to fight youth exclusion have emerged such as community and night schools, the use of radio in distance education programmes and helping poor populations develop income-generating skills.

• Literate women tend to marry later and are more likely to use family planning method.

• Life expectancy at birth rises because children with literate parents are more likely to survive infancy.

• Family income rises as literate parents tend to have fewer children and are more likely to find better-paying jobs.

• Literate workers are more productive as they are more likely to seek ways to improve their work.