chapter 9

Pointers and recommendations

The need for international co-operation which itself has to be radically rethought is felt also in the field of education. This is an issue not only for education policymakers and the teaching profession but for all who play an active part in community life. At the level of international co-operation, a policy of strong encouragement for the education of girls and women should be promoted, in the spirit of the Beijing Conference. So-called aid policy should be made to evolve towards partnership by fostering, among other things, co-operation and exchanges within regional groupings. A quarter of development aid should be devoted to the funding of education. Debt swaps should be encouraged in order to offset the adverse effect of adjustment policies and policies for the reduction of domestic and foreign deficits on educational spending. National education systems should be helped to gain strength by encouraging alliances and co-operation between ministries at regional level and between countries facing similar problems. Countries should be helped to stress the international dimension of the education provided (curricula, use of information technologies and international co-operation). New partnerships between international institutions dealing with education should be encouraged through, for example, the launching of an international project for disseminating and implementing the concept of learning throughout life, on the lines of the inter-agency initiative that resulted in the Jomtien Conference. The gathering, at international level, of data on national investment in education should be encouraged, in particular by the establishment of suitable indicators: total amount of private funds, investment by industry, spending on non-formal education, etc. A set of indicators should be developed for revealing the most serious dysfunctions of education systems, by cross-relating various quantitative and qualitative data, such as: level of spending on education, drop-out rates, disparities in access, inefficiency of different parts of the system, poor-quality teaching, teachers status, etc. With an eye to the future, a UNESCO observatory should be set up to look into the new information technologies, their evolution and their foreseeable impact on not only education systems but also on modern societies. Intellectual co-operation in the field of education should be encouraged through the intermediary of UNESCO: UNESCO professorships, Associated Schools, equitable sharing of knowledge between countries, dissemination of information technologies, and student, teacher and researcher exchanges. UNESCOs normative action on behalf of Member States, for instance in relation to the harmonization of national legislation with international instruments, should be intensified.