El bienestar de los individuos y de las naciones solo depende de lo que las personas saben y lo que pueden hacer con lo que saben.
Esta frase con la que empieza el artículo creo que no ofrece muchas dudas sobre su veracidad, el problema es cómo nos proponemos y entendemos que debe alcanzarse una educación de calidad para todos. Especialmente, en momentos como este de crisis, donde los ricos son cada vez más ricos y los pobres cada vez más pobres. Así según un informe de Oxfam Intermón "el 1% de las familias más poderosas acapara el 46% de la riqueza del mundo. No en vano las mismas organizaciones internacionales que están de acuerdo con la expresión, practican políticas que permiten el enriquecimiento desemesurado de los que más tienen.
Posted: 04 Feb 2014 07:02 AM PST
by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General
The
well-being of individuals and nations depend on nothing more than on
what people know and what they can do with what they know. And if
there’s one lesson the global economy has taught us over the last few
years, it’s that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of a crisis, that
we cannot solely stimulate ourselves out of a crisis and that we cannot
just print money our way out of a crisis. Investing in high-quality
education is the gateway to better skills, better jobs and better lives.
And yet, the
2014 Global Monitoring Report,
the world’s most authoritative source to track progress towards the
‘Education for All’ goals, paints a bleak picture. With the deadline for
these goals less than two years away, progress has been insufficient to
get close to even a single goal by 2015. To date, just half of young
children have access to some form of pre primary education, and in
sub-Saharan Africa it is less than one in five. Universal primary
education is likely to be missed by a wide margin, with 57 million
children still having no access to any schooling. Access is not the only
crisis: one third of primary school age children are not learning the
basics, whether they have been to school or not, and even those who
eventually graduate may not find jobs because their education hasn't
been in sync with the skills that societies need.
It would be a
grave mistake to consider this exclusively or even largely an issue for
conflict zones or the developing world, even if that's where those
issues are most visible. When it comes to education, the world is no
longer divided between rich and well-educated nations and poor and badly
educated ones. Similarly, the challenge of poor schooling is not just
about poor kids in poor neighbourhoods, but about many kids in many
neighbourhoods. Last year, OECD countries invested over USD 230 billion
into teaching children math in the industrialised world, but 23% of
their 15-year-old students performed below the baseline Level 2 on the
PISA 2012 mathematics assessment,
showing that these students can barely use basic mathematical
procedures and conventions to solve problems involving whole numbers.
Worryingly, that proportion is exactly where it stood a decade earlier.
Those
numbers matter, for the life chances of individuals, and for the growth
prospects of nations. If all students attained at least Level 2 in the
PISA mathematics assessment, the combined economic output of OECD
countries could be boosted by USD 200 trillion. So the cost of low
educational performance is far higher than any conceivable investment in
improvement.
The Global Monitoring Report also shows how many
adolescents lack essential foundation skills and adult literacy has
hardly improved since 2000. Here too, the OECD’s
Survey of Adult Skills
finds that poor skills severely limit people’s access to better-paying
and more-rewarding jobs and, at the aggregate level, inequality in the
distribution of skills closely relates to how wealth is shared within
nations. People with better skills are also more likely to volunteer,
see themselves as actors rather than as objects of political processes,
and are more likely to trust others. As the Global Monitoring Report
notes, educated people are more likely to start a business, and their
businesses are likely to be more profitable. In Uganda, owners of
household enterprises with a primary education earned 36% more than
those with no education; those with a lower secondary education earned
56% more. In short, fairness, integrity and inclusiveness in public
policy thus all hinge on the skills of citizens.
Para más información pincha aquí.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8035-0091
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