Ways to educate Asia

But all the awareness and goodwill, and all the projects and resources and activities that followed it, were not always fully rewarded with the expected results. The literacy rates in some countries of the region remain among the highest in the world. Universal primary education continues to remain elusive even in countries with high participation rates. The gap between girls8217; and boys8217; education, between male and female literacy, remains a huge problem.

Data from the Asian countries in the first half of the decade showed almost exclusive focus on the formal primary system. But in the last five years, the expanded vision of Education for All propagated by Jomtien Conference, is finally taking hold.

In almost all countries, even wh-ere access remains a serious problem, there is a major shift in focus from schooling to learning. There is growing realisation that enrolment for all is not the same as education for all. This means two things.

First, it means that mainstream education cannot hope to address all learning needs and must be accompanied by alternative, tailor-made, non-formal learning methods. As a result of this understanding, countries like Indonesia, Philippines and India are experimenting with systems in which participants of non-formal programmes are allowed to cross laterally into the formal system. And as the non-formal sector becomes more formalised, as it were, conversely the formal sector is becoming more informal or less rigid, adopting mother tongues in the first few years or incorporating an eight-week pre-school package at the start of the primary cycle, as in the Philippines.

Second, it means that a formal system does not guarantee that all learning needs of children will be met. Recent achievement test results show an alarming percentage of pupils who have been in the school system three years or more who still have not mastered the basic skills of reading and writing.Policy makers are also slowly getting over the sometimes-false dichotomy of quantity verses quality. Under this dichotomy, when budgets are limited, one must often choose between more textbooks and facilities for those already in school quality, or additional buildings and teachers for those not yet in the system quantity. The drive towards universal primary education in Asia has tended to favour quantity or expanded access. But several countries in South Asia, for example, have reported that more schools do not necessarily translate into more educated students.

When listing impediments to pr-ogress, almost every country menti-ons financial resource constraints. Yet there is a change of focus here not evident a decade ago. Whereas the emphasis used to be the clamour for more money to do basically more of the same, now the emphasis seems to have shifted to how to make better use of the money already available.

The data emerging from the assessment of education in Asia and the Pacific shows that if the goal of universal primary education is to be met a national budgets must introduce dramatic leaps in allocation to primary education; b the responsibility for financing primary education must shift to communities, the private sector, religious groups. NGOs, or parents; and c non-formal education progra-mmes will have to be designed to assume a greater and more integral role in the public education system.

The writer is director of the Bankok-based Principal Regional Office for the Asia and Pacific of the UNESCO