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GATE's chairman and CEO, Mr. Glenn Jones, has said that "Education is the great hope for the survival of humankind and for the forward progress of civilization. " The French revolutionary Danton said more than two centuries ago, "After bread, education. " Education is the most basic necessity after those that are vital to life itself -- food, clothing, and shelter. It is education that lifts people out of the state of chronic poverty in which they are constantly struggling to fulfill basic needs such as these. The truth is that all people have a right to have these basic needs fulfilled, and they also have a right to education. In this regard, the world is not doing very well.
More than 836 million adults in the developing world are illiterate, according to surveys by UNESCO. Around the world, one of every eight children is not enrolled in primary school, and more than one third of adolescents are not in high school. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of these unschooled youngsters and illiterate adults can be found in the poorest countries on earth. The direct link between poverty and lack of educational opportunities has been demonstrated many times over.
As Lyndon Johnson said during the War on Poverty in the 1960 s, "Poverty has many roots, but the tap root is ignorance. " While everyone has a contribution to make in furthering our educational progress, basic education is a fundamental right, and it is the responsibility of governments to provide it. The huge gaps in opportunity that we witness in our world are just one form of injustice, and states are bound by duty and by law to strive for justice. Quite simply, we are not investing enough in education. I am more familiar with the situation in Latin America than in other areas of the world, and I can tell you that in many of our countries, we are condemning our children to be poor laborers, just as their grandparents were. Instead of preparing them for the twenty-first century, we are sending them back to the nineteenth century. We can do much better than this.
I have recently proposed that the next government of Costa Rica set and reach the goal of having universal education through the age of seventeen by the year 2006. In order to do this, we will have to increase the share of our budget that goes to education. According to Costa Rica's constitution, we should be spending 6 % of our gross domestic product each year on public education. It is not happening. The actual figure is just below five percent, and the reason is that we do not have our fiscal house in order.
For Costa Rica to be able to comply with the mandates of its own constitution, and in a broader sense, for all societies to fulfill their obligations to their poorest citizens, we must begin by instituting responsible macroeconomic policies, eliminating the fiscal deficit, reducing the public debt, and creating the conditions for greater economic growth. Only if we strike the proper economic balances will we be able to alleviate poverty. These adjustments are vital for the well-being of the whole society. Our children deserve no less from their leaders. Many leaders of poor countries will tell you that the cost of providing decent educational opportunities is prohibitive.
Saddled with debt, lacking infrastructure, and short of trained personnel, many nations in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and elsewhere simply cannot afford to provide basic schooling for all of their children. However, this is not a problem of lack of resources, but rather a problem of resource allocation, both within developing countries and on the part of the wealthier countries. The United Nations estimates that it would only take an additional six billion dollars per year to make basic educational opportunities available to the entire population of the developing world. To put that figure into perspective, consider that Americans spend 8 billion dollars per year on cosmetics, and Europeans spend 11 billion dollars annually on ice cream. Or consider the fact the world spends 780 billion dollars per year on weapons and soldiers. Obviously, the resources necessary to provide educational services exist; it is just a matter of changing our priorities and redirecting them so that they benefit the needy children of the world.
Making this happen will require a serious commitment on the part of poor and rich countries alike. In the developing world, those leaders who complain for lack of resources must begin by checking their arms procurement budgets. I want to quote my good friend, the late Mahbub ul-Haq, who was a pioneer of the human development school of thought. In his book on human development, he notes: "Sometime back, Tanzania's president Julius Nyerere asked in legitimate despair, 'must we starve our children to pay our debts?' It is at least as pertinent to ask, must we starve our children to increase our defense expenditure? ... When our children cry for milk in the middle of the night, shall we give them guns instead?" I believe that every leader of a developing country must re-examine the priorities of their national budget and redirect resources from the military to the fulfillment of basic human needs. In many countries, however, this will still not be enough.
The wealthy countries, too, have a commitment to make when it comes to educating the world's poor. Our societies are too closely linked, by modern communications as well as by historical relationships, for the industrialized countries to exonerate themselves from some part of the responsibility for giving poor countries a hand into the twenty-first century. That helping hand must take two primary forms: debt forgiveness and increased foreign aid. Debt forgiveness for the poorest countries has begun, but it must urgently be expanded. Foreign aid in real terms has actually shrunk over the past twenty years, and the United States has led the charge away from humanitarian and foreign aid, even as its economy has grown to unprecedented levels.
When we speak of the global economy and the developing world, I think it is important that we recognize the danger in the emphasis we place today on competitiveness. We have created numerous indices of competitiveness that show us which countries or regions offer the greatest incentives for investment, and where the profit margins are the highest. While competition may create efficient economies, efficiency alone is not enough. Compassion and solidarity are necessary to temper the competition of our open economies, so that those who are unable to compete are not left out altogether. To the rural farmer that lacks roads on which to bring his produce to market, to the child who works instead of learning to read and write, to the young adult for whom a university education is only a fantasy, competitiveness means only one thing: losing. What is needed today is a new Marshall plan for the worlds poor.
In 1947 the United States pledged up to twenty billion dollars to re-build Europe after the war, and the investment proved extremely profitable. What would it take to get governments not only that of the U. S. , but all of the well-off industrialized nations to commit to a similar plan today, in order to re-build the worlds poorest countries, which have been devastated by centuries of colonialism, natural disasters, armed conflicts and poor governance? I propose that a group of countries such as the O.
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Research essay sample on Twenty First Century Lack Of Resources
