Investing in education can be very profitable for individuals and societies. People were once skeptical, but now there’s proof: investment in education and economic growth really do go hand-in-hand. And it’s true for secondary and university level
education as well as for primary, according to a survey enititled Financing Education — Investments and Returns that reports on 16 developing countries.
The study was recently published by Unesco and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Developing countries that have invested in human resources over the past two decades are reckoned to have added half a percentage point to their growth rates. Such progress is also felt by individuals, since those with educational diplomas have a better chance of getting a job, keeping it and earning more money. The higher one gets on the educational ladder the better it gets. In Paraguay, for example, those with higher education earn on average 300% more than those with only a secondary school diploma.
The survey is one more argument in favour of Education for All. Investment in education is not just what ought to be done by helping people to blossom and giving them an opportunity for a better standard of living. It is also an economic necessity. ‘It’s very simple,” says Serge Péano, senior programme specialist with Unesco’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). ‘Education is the root of any society’s growth. There’s no other development model for people who can’t read or write.”
The strength of rich countries is based on education, Péano says. ‘Brain power is still their trump card in a competitive world.” This is particularly true in the context of globalisation and a knowledge economy, where the number of unskilled jobs is shrinking.
Worldwide, 63% of the the cost of education is paid for by the state, but recent trends point to increasing private funding of education.
More and more schools are funded by governments but managed by private firms.
One example is Edison School, a company that today manages more than 100 schools in the United States. Most are ‘charter schools”, which means they get government money according to how many pupils they have and parents do not have to pay any fees. Starting out in the US, this formula has now spread to the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and other countries.
‘These initiatives are based on the idea that you can run schools like companies and foster excellence by making them
compete with each other,” says Igor Kitayev, an IIEP programme specialist.
But what defenders of State-funded education fear is that this trend will create two-tier education systems: schools in better-off residential areas will be favoured financially and enjoy very high educational standards. ‘This kind of thing creates social ghettos,” says Hirtt.
‘Why should the way a company is run always be the model?” adds social scientist Christian Laval, author of L’école n’est pas une enterprise (School is not a business). ‘To get results,” he says, ‘you have to make students want to learn. You can’t calculate or count that.”
Privatising education is also spreading to poor countries, many of which have not always made the necessary effort to enrol the maximum number of children in their state schools. The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2002 points out that 70 countries are unlikely to achieve the Education for All targets by 2015.
Poor countries are spending relatively less per pupil than the rich OECD countries. In 2000, Jordan only spent 5% of its budget on education, not much more than Guinea-Bissau (4.8%), compared with 11.3% in Spain and 15.6% in Norway. Meanwhile the amount of international aid shrinks, so governments are looking to families themselves to help bear the cost — paying for such things as equipment, supplies, uniforms and, increasingly, school fees.
In the 16 countries surveyed by Unesco and OECD, one sixth of all children go to a private school (most of which are subsidised by the State), compared with one tenth in the OECD countries.
The private education on offer comes in different forms — including entirely private institutions, private tuition (which is increasingly important especially in Asia), schools contracted by the government and schools runs by NGOs or local communities.
The community school model has especially caught on in Africa to make up for the State’s failings. Such schools are usually in remote country areas and aim to provide the largest number of children with basic education.
In Mali, for example, where illiteracy tops 70%, the number of community schools has grown from 175 in 1995 to over 1 500 today — more than one third of all primary schools. Enrolment in private schools increases sharply at secondary and university levels. Independent private schools educate 63% of youth at these higher levels in Brazil and 73% in the Philippines.
So access to education for the poorest children is still very irregular. ‘Equal opportunity has to remain the target,” says Albert Motivans of Unesco’s Institute for Statistics, who was involved in the Unesco/OECD survey. ‘If we want to reduce poverty, we have to share the cost fairly,” he adds.
If this is not done, the world’s 115-million children with no access to education are likely to face a closed schoolroom door for many years to come.
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