ESSAY
The Business of Schooling
By George Kent
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| One of the winning entries of the Poster Competition organized by the World Summit on the Information Society, in collaboration with the UN Cyberschoolbus: Lau Hei Tung, 10, China. |
The human right to education is well established, in principle if not in practice, and is described in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and elaborated in Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Similar provisions are set out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, primarily in Articles 28 and 29. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights' General Comment 13 provides an authoritative interpretation of its implications.1 Yet, we repeatedly see high aspirations defeated by the lack of resources devoted to education. It seems that funding is never adequate despite the clear evidence on the value of education.
The World Conference on Education for All, held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, spelled out the aspirations in "The World Declaration on Education for All", known as the Jomtien Declaration, and also produced the Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs. The results are familiar: "These recommendations largely failed to generate the response needed to meet the growing demand-supply crisis in basic education."2 The issue persists, as Special Rapporteur on the right to education Katarina Tomasevski and her fellow advocates keep coming up against the same problem.3 This is most severe in poor countries, but even countries that do have money often fail to give education high priority in their budgets. Perhaps a reconsideration of the way we think about the right to education would open new opportunities.
Many different parties share responsibility for the realization of human rights, but the primary obligation falls on national governments. They have obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights. The requirement to fulfil includes the obligation to facilitate and, under some conditions, entails the obligation to provide directly. We usually think of the right to education in terms of the obligation of Governments to provide educational services directly; they should rather, perhaps, give more attention to facilitating schooling, especially at the secondary and higher levels.
Social returns to investment in education are high. The data demonstrate unambiguously that government expenditures on education yield substantial benefits on many dimensions of development. But if education pays off so handsomely, why don't Governments and parents guide children accordingly? How can social investment be aligned with private investment? Perhaps we can get an answer by looking at education as a means of addressing the problem of child labour, which is a matter of concern when children work in conditions that are abusive and exploitative. More precisely, Article 3 of the International Labour Organization's Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour of 1999 defines the worst forms in terms of slavery, prostitution, pornography and illicit activities, and more generally as "work which by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children".4
Those who offer proposals for dealing with the exploitation of children generally fall into two major camps: the abolitionists who want to end child labour; and the ameliorationists who want to improve the conditions under which they work. Neither camp has been very effective. National and international child labour laws are frequently ignored in both rich and poor nations. Such laws are regularly ignored in practice, because they do not take full account of the social, political and economic forces that sustain child labour. Yes, one can say children should not work, but how then are they and their families to live? Yes, one can say children should have better lighting and better toilet facilities in their workplaces, but how exactly are these extra costs to be paid, and what will motivate that payment?
Where children, parents, employers and Governments all feel they get some benefit from the existing practice and see no attractive alternatives, they will ignore and circumvent efforts to change the child labour situation. Attempts have been made to provide better alternatives for children, but they have consistently collapsed under the burden of their costs. How is it possible to break out of this dilemma? Historically, compulsory schooling and the control of child labour in developed countries have been motivated by two major considerations: organized labour found it advantageous to remove children from the labour pool so that adult wages would be higher; and the building of skill levels or "human capital" through education increased individuals' earning capacities. Schooling was an investment, something seen by both Governments and parents as worth doing because there would be a payoff later.
What can developing countries do to assure that schooling is in fact a productive investment? Schools in many poor countries are not likely to build up useful money-earning skills, and in many cases their performance levels are abysmally low, partly because these schools are funded by Government, regardless of how well they perform. Parents see little value in having their children attend school and are certain only of the fact that those who attend forgo the opportunity to do immediately useful work in the fields or on the streets.
Many vocational schools for the poor have been created, often with support from private charities. Their success record has been mixed and their scale remains small in relation to the size of the need. Usually, they depend on external subsidies that are neither large enough nor sustained through time. Perhaps they have not flourished because they have not been organized in a businesslike manner. Vocational schools could be organized as private businesses, which would succeed as economically viable operations if they were effective in developing money-earning skills in their students.
The challenge, of course, is to find ways to pay for such schools. Perhaps, means can be found to invest in the students themselves, and techniques can be adapted from successful microcredit programmes such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The Bank has made loans to hundreds of thousands of the poorest women in Bangladesh, with an average loan of under $100, and repayment rates have been high. Similar microcredit programmes now exist in many countries and they have good records of success in their enterprises and loan repayment. They vary in structure, but most have some sort of social support system integrated with the lending programme.5
Microcredit programmes usually provide the means for borrowers to start new enterprises. A comparable lending programme could be devised to help individuals pay school tuition fees to learn marketable skills. Putting these ideas together, the recommendation is that private vocational schools could be created with curricula designed to build skills that would enhance long-term earning capacity in the local setting; tuition could be paid through loans against future earnings.
Having children work for years to pay off a debt may seem uncomfortably similar to the situation some face as bonded labourers. There are important differences however: no child should be asked to do this without the consent of both child and parents; there must be very clear and explicit contracts and repayment schedules; and the consequences of default on the loan should be plain and limited.
Social support mechanisms can play an important role in facilitating repayment of tuition loans. For example, parents, relatives and perhaps community members could share in the liability, so that they are contractually obligated to pay if the child does not. This would strengthen the parents' and relatives' incentives to provide encouragement and support for the child in studying and, upon graduation, in seeking gainful and stable employment. Properly designed vocational schools could help to strengthen families and communities.
Apart from conveying technical skills, the school could also serve as a social support system during and after the student's attendance. Faculty and staff members would be expected to develop long-term relationships with students and their families. Graduates would be expected to return frequently to talk with current students and to help maintain the school with money, skills and whatever other resources they can muster. The feeling about the school would not be that of a factory churning out standardized products but of a large extended family. No student would have the right or the requirement to attend; instead, acceptance should come to be viewed as a privilege.
The school would have to be of first-rate quality in teaching skills that would be of value locally, whether these are of carpentry, plumbing, truck driving, or anything else that may be in demand. Research would be needed to discover which skills are needed, and particular attention should be given to skilled jobs that outsiders take in the local area. The school could also offer training in entrepreneurship so that graduates would be better prepared to create new opportunities for themselves and others in their communities.
The proposed school would be a self-sufficient institution, surviving on its own success, and would not depend on a permanent external subsidy from government or private sources. If it were not effective, the earning power of its students would not increase. They would thus find it difficult to repay their tuition loans, and if enough students default on their loans, the school's cash flow would suffer and eventually dry up and disappear. This self-testing characteristic is missing from publicly-supported school systems. Public schools ordinarily have no strong feedback cycle and no reinforcement schedule to keep their performance level up. Typically, they are doomed to being funded inadequately, assuring their mediocrity, and being funded perpetually, assuring their perpetual mediocrity.
This proposal for businesslike vocational schools can be appealing to both the political left and the political right. It is designed to help the poor, but is based on using the free market directly to liberate them from their plight. These schools would not be unending drains on public resources and would require outside capital only for start-up, after which they could be self-sustaining. Of course, continuing contributions would always be welcome to allow them to reach more children. They could be started as small experiments. Small boards of interested individuals could take the responsibility for drawing up concrete plans and budgets suited to local circumstances. Start-up funding might be obtained from local industrialists who are willing to create that possibility for others.
Such schools and tuition loan programmes might be established on the basis of resources and resourcefulness already available within poor countries. But the possibilities would be greater with backing from governmental and non-governmental organizations. The World Bank, in particular, should see that these schools would have beneficial effects for national economies, while at the same time benefiting children, and would constitute investments in human capital in a very literal sense.
Understandably, there are great fears regarding the commodification of education. It creates openings for different kinds of abuse. However, the argument here is that making education into a marketable commodity can also have significant advantages if used with care. Business-based schools need not be entirely independent operations, but could be operated under license from the State, thus limiting the potentials for abuse. Having some educational offerings take up some of the characteristics of commodities is not necessarily bad. The managed semi-privatization of schooling could yield many benefits compared with the schooling being offered in many parts of the world.
From a human rights perspective, there is a requirement for the State to make education available and accessible, but there is also a need to respect "the personal freedom of individuals to choose between State-organized and private education. … From this stems the freedom of natural persons or legal entities to establish their own educational institutions."6 Insisting that the State must retain a monopoly on education at any level would violate individual freedom and might also tend to assure that only uniform, low-quality products are offered.
We should be cautious about services that are supposed to be free. In some developing countries, health care is provided free, and in some countries there is even a constitutional guarantee of free health care. In those circumstances, we can be sure that all health care will be of minimal quality. Health care, education or food must be paid for in some way; it can be free to the consumer, but some agency somewhere must bear the cost. Government promises of free health care or free schooling can mean promises of mediocre health care or mediocre schooling.
The Articles on the right to education in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights emphasize free education, especially at the primary level. With regard to secondary and higher education, there is a call for progressive introduction of free education. However, in Article 13(3), there is an acknowledgement that parents may wish to choose schools other than those established by public authorities, provided that they "conform to such minimum educational standards as may be laid down or approved by the State". Similarly, Article 13(4) says: "No part of this article shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject … to the requirement that the education given in such institutions shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down by the State."
Thus we can conclude with a few proposed principles. A State is obligated to make primary education compulsory and available free to all, and to progressively introduce free education at the secondary and higher levels; it should respect, protect and facilitate the offering of alternative, tuition-based education either by the State itself or private parties; it should help to create suitable loan programmes that could be used to pay for tuition; and it should help provide start-up funding for educational programmes managed by private parties, and should oversee such programmes to assure that they meet minimum standards.
The danger in this approach is that if an array of tuition-based educational options is offered, then free education—which is costly to the State—may be allowed to deteriorate. However, public education in many countries has already deteriorated to a very low level. Rather than offer only schooling provided directly by the State, it is better to offer a range of educational options. Given the opportunity, many will choose affordable education with quality over free education of little value.
Some see treating education as a commodity for sale as something that is inherently opposed to the idea of education as a human right.7 However, we should consider that treating food as a commodity does not directly violate the idea of food as a human right. Why suggest that there is necessarily a "duality of education available against a price and education available against an entitlement"?8 States are obligated to provide free primary education, but there is a need for economic creativity to assure that quality secondary schooling becomes available. One could perhaps rethink the meaning of entitlement so that secondary students, instead of being entitled to attend a particular school, are entitled to grants and loans to attend licensed schools of their choice. This design would thus include elements of a voucher system.
Education advocates are always concerned about how resources can be mobilized to provide adequate services. They observe that universalizing school enrolment is not just a question of providing adequate facilities, but also likely to involve persuading parents to send their children to school. This is especially true in countries where girls are deliberately kept out of school and where economic considerations prevent children from going.9
If schooling is viewed by its "consumers" as something of high value to them, they will mobilize the resources if they can. Where it is highly valued because of the anticipated future pay-off, there is no need to persuade parents to send their children. Economic forces should be reconfigured through appropriate social design so that economic considerations do not prevent children from going to school, but instead provide compelling reasons for them to go.
Imagine what our meals would be like if we all depended on Government to feed us—we would probably get some sort of uniform watery gruel, something akin to prison fare. In many cases, that sort of thing happens when we depend on Governments to provide education directly. A strategy of facilitating education, rather than always providing it directly, could enrich the range of options that are offered. All should meet some basic minimum standards, but there is no reason why common goals always have to be met by the same means.
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| 1. | See the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Treaty Body Database |
| 2. | Frank P. Dall, "Children's Right to Education: Reaching the Unreached", James R. Himes, ed., Implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child: Resource Mobilization in Low-Income Countries (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1995): 143-82. p. 144. |
| 3. | See the Right to Education Project website |
| 4. | ILO C182 Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999. |
| 5. | The Global Development Research Center. The Virtual Library on Microcredit. See also Mohammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Microlending and the Battle Against World Poverty. (Boulder: Perseus/Public Affairs, 2003). |
| 6. | The Realization of the Right to Education, Including Education in Human Rights. Working Paper presented by Mustapha Mehedi to the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Commission on Human Rights (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1998/10). 3 June 1998. |
| 7. | Whither Education? Human rights law versus trade law |
| 8. | Briefing by Katarina Tomasevski, Special Rapporteur on the right to education of the UN Commission on Human Rights. NGO News Centre. 8 April 2003. |
| 9. | Frank P. Dall, "Children's Right to Education", p. 167. |
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George Kent is professor of political science at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. He is Co-Convener of the Commission on International Human Rights of the International Peace Research Association and member of the Working Group on Nutrition, Ethics and Human Rights of the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition. |
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