Education in a Region of Change

Education is the critical foundation for human resources development. It represents an effective and necessary response to addressing poverty and underdevelopment. UNESCO has taken a lead role in advocating new ways of learning in the region. We spoke to Mr Victor Ordonez, Director of the UNESCO Principal Office for Asia and the Pacific (PROAP), on the educational challenges that lie ahead in this region. Mr Ordonez is a former Deputy Minister and Under-Secretary for Education of the Philippines.

What are the challenges in education in Asia and the Pacific today?
The first challenge is for ministries of education to be flexible. Education has been a sector that has traditionally been managed by sometimes conservative ministries of education. Now with technologies and resources for education changing so rapidly, they are facing new challenges. Quick changes require quick responses.
Second, in basic education, there are two challenges: access and relevance. As for access, one out of five men and two out of five women in the world are entering the next century without basic education. We still have to reach the unreached. But for those that have been reached, the relevance of the education system becomes more important.
For higher education, apart from the issues of internal and external efficiency, old paradigms are changing rapidly. For example, many people return to study after they have worked for some years. This will have a large impact on the traditional higher education system. Universities should become market places of knowledge, rather than exclusive places to study as a preparation for life.

Education is considered a means of empowerment of the people. In your opinion, how can education be used as a tool to promote democracy in Asia and the Pacific?
In my view, education has promoted democracy not by intent but by accident. Governments have learned that by educating people, they have taught them how to access information, and by doing so, to make sound judgements, and live in the spirit of tolerance, understanding, and respect for others. People can make sound judgements if they have free access to information. But the reverse is also true, if a person has no access to the world of information he/she cannot make sound judgements. War and violence are often the result of intolerance and ignorance, which are precisely what education aims to eliminate.

What is UNESCO doing to promote literacy and basic education in the region?
UNESCO is one of several players in this field. It has the basic mandate of the members of the United Nations to deal with education. But we are small. We cannot go out and provide basic education at the village level. What we can do is advocate and underline the importance of education, and education for all, in this world. Because UNESCO is mainly a club of ministers, we are able to highlight areas of concern in education and bring it to the attention of our members.
For example, earlier this year we had a conference of the Permanent Secretaries of education of South Asia. We discussed what we could do about the gap in literacy levels between men and women. It was suggested, for example, that one factor could be that there are not enough female teachers in these countries. Families just don't want to send their daughters to a school with a male teacher. So now other countries are looking into this.

Illiteracy continues to persist in the region. The targets set at the Jomtien World Conference in 1990 were to attain basic education for all by 2000 and to reduce the adult illiteracy rate to one half of 1990 levels by the year 2000. Were these goals realistic?
Statistically speaking, no. Not even the most developed country can attain basic education for every citizen in it. The spirit of the Conference was to get as closely to these targets as possible. The fact remains that there are still many people out there without access to basic education. So that is why we at UNESCO, together with the governments, should continue to give our very best to "reaching the unreached."
But I think we have managed to change the tide. We have stemmed the absolute number of illiterate people. It was growing before the conference was held. Now the number of illiterates in the world is declining. It was over 900 million in 1990, but now we are slowly reducing it to less than 800 million.
Also, more fundamentally, the conference has had a big impact on the statistics of schooling. There have been substantial increases in the national budgets for education as a result of Jomtien, higher than what would be necessary for the natural population growth since 1990. There has been additional schooling for some 50 million more children than if we hadn't had the conference.
So I think we are making success in advocating basic education for all. The number of illiterates is declining, and more young people are going to schools than ever before. That has been the impact. But, of course, we can do better.

As you say, as more young people are going to schools, illiteracy increasingly becomes a problem of the adult segment of the population, and eventually may be eradicated by itself in Asia. What do you think of that observation?
That is correct, but we cannot wait for another 20 or 30 years before that happens. We should shut the faucet off, and make sure all the children are in school. But we also have to mop up the floor, and make sure that adults that are beyond school age still get some form of education, not just literacy, but some form of useful education.
In education, you cannot wait too long. Look at what is happening in Thailand at the moment. The average number of years of schooling of the population is quite low, just 8 years. So the Government has decided to increase the numbers of years of compulsory education. That is good. But that in itself is not enough. The Thai Government has correctly realized that it has to increase the competitiveness of its workforce right now. So it has decided, also as a response to the current economic crisis, to launch an immediate programme to increase the skills capability of the current workforce.

What will be the impact of globalization on education?
It depends on how each individual country handles the issue within its own educational system. The International Commission on Education for the 21st Century, which is headed by Jacques Delors, took this matter as a major theme of its report. It said that educators, educational systems and curricula, have to ensure that they maintain a dynamic tension between promoting an international perspective on the one hand, and preserving local traditions, culture and national identity on the other hand. How that is done is very important.
Whether societies like globalization or not, they will be invaded by all kinds of international influence. How does a society educate its citizens to react to that? Fostering an international perspective and preserving a national identity at the same time, is not a zero-sum game. Strengthening one does not necessarily weaken the other. There are ways of promoting national identity which are intolerant, and there are ways to promote international values that forget your own local cultures. But there are enough societies around the world where you find individuals equally as proud of their ethnic origin, as they are proud of their national citizenship. You can be just as proud as being a member of family X, as you are being a member of town Y or country Z. Therefore it is also equally possible to inculcate a sense of national pride that makes you stand as a stronger and more self-assured member of the international community. This has to find its way in the educational system, into how young citizens are developed in their attitudes towards things foreign. It should definitely develop a sense of local, subnational and national pride, but it should do so in the spirit of tolerance, understanding, and respect for diversity of cultures. That would make society's young people equally comfortable on the world stage.

What are your views on the potential of distance learning in education?
Distance learning is just one way of new learning. We are only at the beginning stage of the impact of technology on education. My suspicion is that technology will affect methodologies in a way that we cannot yet conceive. If universities and institutes of higher learning are slow to respond to this trend, they are going to be left behind. The rest of civil society, particularly the private sector, is using these technologies as a matter of course. Among many academics, technology is feared, rather than used.
Let me make one specific point. A school used to be looked upon as a place where someone should go to gather information. It was an oasis in a desert. A teacher provided a student the information he needed to succeed in life. Now, the student is no longer in a desert, he is in an ocean of information, it is all around him. He is almost drowning in it. What he needs now is not the ability to get the information, but the ability to choose and to select the information that is useful. The role of the educator is no longer to provide information but to teach a student how to filter it. Before many teachers saw themselves as a warehouse of information. Well, now the warehouse is a computer screen, it's not the teacher anymore. But the teacher has to be the guide, he has to explain the use of it. That's a very different role. I think schools are not yet realizing that fundamental change in their role.

If you had a message to convey to the governments of this region, what would it be?
The first message would be to be flexible. The second message would be to hurry. It seems that many governments are not yet committed enough to accelerating progress. And my third message would be to be true to their country, and to their principles, particularly in responding to the educational needs of their societies.