Spreading education

“Knowledge is power. Information is librating. Education is the premise of      progress, in every society, in every family”  –  Kofi Annan

Education is one of the most necessary requirements of the modern world but still, more than 781 million adults cannot read or write which is more than the entire population of North America and many more are to follow as millions of children still don’t attend school. The least literate countries of the world include nations under political or economic turmoil. Apparently, a key reason for children not attending school is that parents don’t allow their wards to go to school. In economically weak and underdeveloped countries as children are treated as a method to increase the family’s income. In such situations problems such as child labour become inevitable. To stop this Mexico adopted Prospera a conditional cash transfer initiative. The programme provides a fixed monetary transfer to families if their children attend at least 85% of school days, and receive regular health check-ups. The amount of aid is directly proportional to the age of the children so that children who reach a certain age from which they can be used as financial tools continue to come to school. This program had some flaws in its implementation but nonetheless, Mexico has provided a model to the whole world which has been already adopted by Brazil, Peru, Honduras, Jamaica, Chile, Malawi and Zambia. The use of ICTs (informational and communicational technologies) in low income, isolated communities with cooperation with UNICEF has been beneficial. With the help of ICTs, the situation in Africa has been improved drastically and soon many more continents are to continue the path of using and revamping the current methods for implementing ICTs to increase their effectiveness. The UN school in a box system has to be implemented in conflicted areas with the help of NGOs actively working in those particular regions such as Kayany foundation in Syria and CED in Africa. In my view for the creation of a better system of spreading education in the most illiterate and economically weak areas of the world, a systematic process must be adopted i.e. the plan must be divided into phases. Phase 1 should be aimed at children between the ages of 5-10. Under this phase, short term measures must be adopted such as the elders of the community need to be encouraged to provide the children with knowledge about their mother tongue and basic arithmetic. Volunteer teachers must be identified who can impart formal education to these children and the curriculum should be adopted from the developed nations. Regular counselling of children needs to happen to prevent children from getting radicalised or using drugs. Phase 2 should be aimed at children between the ages of 10-18. This phase must focus primarily on the secondary education of the children with subjects such as science, social sciences and mathematics and also a special emphasis on moral values. Group study centres with the help of pre-packaged teaching materials complemented by broadcast and recorded media must be established. Phase 3 should build upon the accomplishments of the previous phases and works towards the betterment of the opportunities in the field of higher studies. This phase should also include a programme for providing scholarships to refugees and work on the establishment of workshops for efficient teaching of social and employment skills which can be flown in from developed nations. Since language is a major barrier, with public-private partnerships, the proper budget should be allocated to resources for professional language translation services. This step would help to preserve the culture and tradition of a region by not forcing children to adopt a foreign language.

Irrespective of race, creed, and gender, education makes it possible for people to stand out as equal, with all the other persons from different walks of life. Education is one of those weapons by which one can change the whole world by creating an education-friendly environment for children we are investing for a better future free of terrorism, poverty, starvation and many other problems.