Published Monday, November 1, 2004
Panel Assesses Progress on 'Education For All' 
Summers Introduces Speakers at Recent Askwith Forum  
By Juno Nakamura

The World Bank's Elaine Wolfensohn visited a village school in Madagascar recently and saw a room of students who were being taught general subjects in French, a language they could not understand. In Ethiopia, Wolfensohn saw half-day primary classrooms with 75 students each, taught by the same teacher in the morning and afternoon shifts.

While girls in some pockets of Africa are beginning to gain access to schools, this does not mean that they have an opportunity to gain an education.

"Unless you provide quality teaching and quality textbooks, there is no chance these girls will go on," she told over 250 students, professors, and professionals who crowded the Askwith Lecture Hall last Tuesday evening.

Wolfensohn was one of the four distinguished guest speakers introduced by Harvard President (and former World Bank chief economist) Lawrence Summers, who himself emphasized that the highest return on investment available in the developing world is funding primary and secondary school education for young girls.

  The funding is beginning to make a difference, said Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF. She excitedly waved a copy of a recent issue of the New York Times, which featured an in-depth story about Kenyan youth crowding into schools now that the nation has eliminated entrance fees.

  “We (UNICEF) believe passionately in abolishing school fees and hidden fees,” Bellamy exclaimed. She cited Education for All (EFA), the international commitment agreed upon 15 years ago in Thailand, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), devised at the 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit, as the blueprints for development and education in poorest countries today.

“Education for all by 2015 is simultaneously the world’s most ambitious and pathetic goal," said Gene Sperling, director of the Center on Universal Education at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is ambitious because 36 of the 155 delegate countries are on the path [to education for all]. But why only primary education, why only until 2015 is why it is so pathetic.”

Sperling pointed out seven, largely economic barriers to aligning the interests of the parents with that of sending their children to school: direct fees; indirect fees; opportunity costs; costs of uniforms and books and other indirect fees; cultural barriers; poor quality of schools, and the long distance between the school and the students’ homes.

“If you take all those barriers away, you get success almost everywhere,” Sperling said.

Meanwhile, Sperling had at least one critical word for research on education that he considers insufficient to solving international problems.

“My highly academic response to highly academic studies is ‘duh’,” Sperling said, triggering laughter from the audience. “What we really need is a study on why things aren’t working.”

The evening was already off to a humorous start when HGSE Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann remarked that she highly recommended -- but had not read -- a 1992 paper on girls' education penned by President Summers.  The president jokingly responded by saying Lagemann “profess[ed] admiration for the person you work for, but [did not have] enough time to read his work."

Seriousness returned to the floor when HGSE Assistant Professor Fernando Reimers posed a question to the audience:  “Try to imagine whether we could have had this conversation [about education for all] 60 years ago. My answer to this is probably not.”

Reimers stressed the importance for research universities such as Harvard to deepen their dialogue with world leaders, “so that we can explore with them ways in which research generated in universities can be helpful.”

Vivian Stewart, vice president for education at the Asia Society, applauded Harvard’s education as a “great model for producing globally-minded citizens.”

Stewart emphasized the importance of educating Americans. “If we are to meet the MDGs, we need a different vision toward education in developed nations as well as in developing nations,” Stewart said. “Americans need to learn more about the rest of the world.”

Peter Cooper, a masters student in the International Education Policy Program, praised the EFA discussion. “I really liked how the speakers outlined practical things that can be done to achieve EFA and brought the discussion into practical dialogue.”

Cooper said meeting with world leaders was one of the key reasons for coming to study at HGSE and said he is also looking forward to the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES)’s North East Regional Conference on November 12 through 13, where HGSE alumni working at the World Bank will discuss issues in international education and advise students on developing a career in the field.

“Everyday, there is a great speaker or an exciting brown bag lunch," Cooper said. "I am so pleased."

Juno Nakamura is a contributing writer for The Appian.