An access to quality education – Sustainable Development Goal #4 – can improve the overall health and longevity of a community, grow economies, enhance livelihood prospects and possibly even combat climate change. It can result in political stability, democracy, and can reduce the spread of communicable diseases that plague poverty stricken areas through increased awareness of symptoms and treatments. In fact 91 percent of Americans would agree improving access to education is an effective way of helping developing countries overcome poverty.
But for many reasons, education is still deemed a luxury; available only to those born into privilege, born male, or born in developed countries.
A global funding crisis is partially responsible for the failure of education systems, worldwide, to deliver, with the amount of total aid allocated to education having decreased annually over the past four years. Without access to basic educational aids such as textbooks and stationery, the internet, or safe learning environments, it is almost impossible to provide educational opportunities – and to have access to any of these, there must be funding. In some parts of Africa – Tanzania, for example – only 3.5 per cent of all grade six students have their own school textbook. Without educational materials to guide lessons, share with students and use in the classroom, how can teachers be expected to provide their students with a quality education?
Gender also plays a huge part in the issue. According to UNESCO, 31 million primary school aged girls do not currently attend school and 17 million of these will probably never have the chance to do so. Altogether, over 130 million school aged females around the world are not currently enrolled in school. Race is also a significant factor in whether or not a young person receives an education, even in developed countries such as the United States. And it’s not just going to school that is a problem – it is staying in school. In the United States, black students are expelled three times the rate white students are, and alarmingly, black female students are suspended at higher rates than all other girls and boys.
Race is becoming such a critical education issue that many black American families are opting to homeschool their children, for fear of racism from white students, failed curriculums, the “Eurocentric orientation” of most American schools, and the attitudes of students’ school teachers – of which whites make up roughly 85 per cent.
Jumping back to developing countries, we see a student’s distance from school, civil conflict, hunger and poor nutrition, and the cost of an education as key factors in the high numbers of illiterate or uneducated young people.
So, given that literacy and knowledge is universally acknowledged as the solution to poverty, inequality and lack of livelihood options in developing communities, could open online education be the answer?
Young women account for 59 per cent of the total number of young illiterate people around the world, and 263 million young people did not have access to an education in 2014. Looking beyond school aged children, there are roughly 758 million adults who remain illiterate today around the world. Could open, free, non-formal education in the form of online courses provide the answer developing countries have been seeking?
Traditional, face-to-face schooling with all that it requires and demands will never meet the scale and extent of what is needed to help developing countries truly develop – not to the extent which the UN Sustainable Development Goals suggest is needed. But just a small chunk of funding can result in the development of hundreds if not thousands of online, readily available courses, accessible to all within reach of the internet. Through open education, we could truly educate the world, could we not?
There will always be cynics. And studies to date have shown that previous attempts to share open and distance learning with communities of developing countries has been largely ineffective, largely because the only experiments in open education to date have lacked sizable backing, government support and have been underfunded pilot projects.
Inadequate telecommunication infrastructure, together with high internet costs and limited access, is another issue. One conference staged in Pennsylvania on ‘MOOCS for Development’ in 2014 found also that without people having prerequisite skills such as English, literacy and pre-knowledge about the subjects, MOOCS would not have the anticipated impact on developing countries.
But with the backing of governments worldwide, serious investment into a global ‘online infrastructure’, and with the right approach to enticing illiterate and otherwise isolated communities online, we could see real widespread change. I don’t just mean people, the sort of change that would see people upskilling in fancy languages, the art of calligraphy, ancient Roman history or how to deliver therapy worldwide via the internet or in a brick and mortar center such as Naya Clinics who offer online therapy with professionally equipped therapists in Columbus Ohio and other locations with the aim of contributing real, impactful change.
Change that would see the world a better place; more equitable, wealthier, kinder, healthier and more environmentally and socially conscious. A world of greater democracy, happiness, and hope – hope not only for the lucky few but for communities that until now have been effectively cut off from the world and all it has to offer.