Inclusive Education: Good Quality Education for All

Last week of November, over 100 education ministers from all over the world had met in Geneva, Switzerland at the 48th session of the International Conference on Education (ICE). The purpose of the conference is to assist participants in achieving quality Education for All through innovative curriculum development and its respective implementation.

This year's theme was, Inclusive Education: the Way of the Future, reaching out to marginalized groups as, HIV/AIDS orphans, people with disabilities, migrants, street children, and others. As these groups are generally excluded from the mainstream school system, the inclusive education, looks to inform the global community on ways to become more open to diversity and effectively reduce drop-out rates.


However, the EFA Global Monitoring Report of the 2009 warns, if current conditions do not change, things look bleak for achieving Education for All by 2015 as, the UNESCO goal is.

UNESCO in the Spotlight: Education and Culture comments on the reports and says: "Governments' failures to address rampant inequalities is cited as the main culprit. These inequalities stem from many sources such as weak domestic policies, the stagnation of financial assistance from donors, and a culture of political indifference...Yet much more critically, these inequalities will continue to perpetuate what UNESCO reports as a 'vast gulf' between rich and poor and will sorely misserve much of the world's population. Avoiding these issues will certainly have lasting global consequences."

We all learned this week that U.S. is living a recession and this is particularly important for the Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura who declared that educational initiatives often receive much less attention in comparison to other crises. "When financial systems fail, the consequences are highly visible and governments act” but, “When education systems fail the consequences are less visible, but no less real... That is why governments must act with a greater sense of urgency.”

Nobody is talking about education in the middle of the American financial crisis. Obama isn't even thinking of this fact, much less about clear ways to solve the inequality in the ways we are distributing the process of educate young citizens.

Photo credit: Henry407 ( HL )

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