Quality education for all

A TED talk about the learning crisis

https://www.ted.com/talks/amel_karboul_the_global_learning_crisis_and_what_to_do_about_it/footnotes

Amel Karboul tells us that she is here today because of a decision. When the Tunisia became indipendent, the new president decided that 20% of the GDP should be devoted to create free high quality education for all the boys and girls of the country. Minds, rather than bridges and roads, were deemed to be a more important infrastructure to build.

We should have the boldness to take similar decision to address the global learning crisis.

What is the learning crisis?

The huge number of children who are either out of school, or are in school but not learning. It is estimated that without action, by 2030 half of the children will be in such a condition.

The solution to the crisis however is at hand: if every country would apply the best-practice which are currently applied in the countries which have similar GDP / income, the learning crisis would be solved in just one generation. The schools have to become used to deliver results.

There are of course problems to solve: there could be too little teachers, or the population could be distributed over a very large area, like, for example, people living in Amazonia. It would be very hard to have a number of high quality and specialized teachers distributed over such a vast territory, and it would be impractical to move the students to capitals for them to attend school there.

Brazil developed an interesting system to solve this problem: specialized content teachers deliver lessons on-line, while local tutoring teachers help the students on-site. Communication channel is two-way, so the students can make questions and interact with the remote teacher as well.

Despite the technical difficulties, this helped a large number of students to attend lessons which would have been impossible to deliver otherwise. This had another benefit: the content teachers become sort of "stars", thus making the teaching profession attractive to students, who will have more respect of it.

There are two aspects at least to take into consideration, when dealing with such reforms: how to organize the reform and how to finance it.

For the first point, the approach is to gather all the relevant stakeholders (students, teachers, unions, parents, government representative, ngo) so that the reforms, once they are agreed upon, are shared among all. 

In the implementation phase, weekly checks are done, to review the progresses, which includes on-site checks to verify that what should be done is done.

For the financial parts, the funding should come primarly from the state (remember Tunisia). However, if a state requires to lend the money to implement such a reform, they developed special financial programs to remove the burden of the interests from that.

Putting such reforms in place will allow to have quality education for all.