US, Japan Stingiest Givers for Education
Washington, DC - Eight years ago the world’s wealthiest countries promised to provide the funding needed to ensure that all children worldwide can attend school. But now, halfway to the global 2015 deadline for universal primary education, developed countries are failing to come up with the aid.
This was the conclusion reached at the close of a high-level meeting
in Dakar, Senegal, on funding for globally agreed goals for education articulated at the 2000 “Education for All” meeting and reflected in the Millennium Development Goals.
The failure is laid out country-by-country in an innovative global “report card” on progress in education released Dec. 11 by a coalition of NGOs, the Global Campaign for Education.
By 2015, all children are supposed to have access to complete, free, compulsory, quality primary education, and gender disparities in education should be completely eliminated.
Now, mid-way to the 2015 deadline, there appears to be little hope of success.
At the meeting in Dakar, developed countries refused to set a target for spending on global education, even though developing countries agreed to devote 10 per cent of their national budgets to the sector.
Nicholas Burnett, director of the 2008 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, called the outcome of the Dakar meeting “a major disappointment.” Burnett’s group said an additional $11 billion is needed to reach global education goals by 2015.
UNESCO chief Koichiiro Matsuura agreed, remarking: “I cannot be very optimistic.”
Meanwhile, the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) charged that at current rates of progress, global goals “will not be realized by 2115, let alone in the next seven-and-a-half years.”
The GCE’s report card, entitled “No Excuses,” ranks every country with a grade from A to F for its efforts in education, including donor nations. It points to the U.S. and Japan as two of the stingiest givers. Norway and the Netherlands are the most generous.
Some developing countries have made significant progress toward improving access to education, especially those that have abolished all fees for primary school. Ghana, for example, abolished school fees in September 2005, and has seen a large influx of new students, including girls.
But Ghana, Kenya and a handful of other countries that took this bold step then found that school facilities were insufficient for the new crowds, and many more teachers were needed to meet demand while still providing quality education.
For the most part, countries need help from abroad to finance the many changes required by the goals of universal primary education and education for all. Not only new classrooms and more teachers, but sometimes curriculum reform and special outreach efforts to parents to allow their girl children to attend school are needed.
In poor countries, children not in school face special dangers. In addition to not being prepared to earn an income as adults, these children are often used as low-paid laborers in dangerous occupations and are vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of sexual exploitation.
“Leaders must stop failing the world’s children,” said the GCE, arguing that now is the time for renewed commitment by rich and poor nations alike to ensuring that the goals agreed to in 2000 can be achieved by 2015.
© 2007 One World
no surprise.
Japan and then the US are the stingiest providers of official development assistance in the developed world. Of the rich countries, only the US, Japan & Canada do not have a timeline for meeting the international agreed upon goal of 0.7% of GNI in official development assistance. Every other rich country should be meeting this goal (which was reiterated in the Monterrey Consensus and subsequently) by 2015.
shame on us, and shame on our political leaders for being such cowards. Even Barack Obama refuses to issue a timeline for reaching (or to even accept as valid) the goal of 0.7%. He’d double foreign aid, which would mean we would be giving about 0.4% of GNI
In the US, the pattern is consistent: One political group manages to connect education to some socialism-like bogeyman, or an ambiguous source of government waste, all the while screaming about freedom, (in)security, and money. No other group is as powerful or loud enough in countering this, or exposing it for the absurdity it is, and so we end up with one more tank instead of several more teachers. This will likely continue until the day comes when highly-educated men and women from overseas no longer want to come to the US. Will we then see a brain drain in the reverse?
Do you want to know why the US gives proportionately the lowest amount to public school education - in its international aid packages? When I lived in Thailand in the early 19070’s - The chubbier of America’s two-man military dictatorship, General Prapat, nixed any additional funding for literacy programs to the impoverished Northeast Thailand, saying, “The more people can read, the more they become Communist!” He took his marching orders from the JUSMAG. Ask again, why does the US spend more on training a poor countries police in techniques of repression that it would ever allow to be spent in spreading literacy among the poor? General Prapat’s message still resonates: “The more they read,the more they challenge the repressive feudal and class system of their US client government.
Crikey, the US doesn’t provide enough for it’s own kids, let alone someone else in another country that cannot be pronounced or found on a globe (often mistaken for a colorful basketball).
This, what I am saying does not apply to ALL Japanese persons, citizens or born and/or living abroad, but might this stinginess on the part of the govt of Japan be related to the explicit Japanese principle of needing to always stay focused on the “higher cause”, or whatever they name it; same meaning, but perhaps by called a little differently?
I noticed it again with respect to whether or not they should protest against the war on Iraq, some citizens of Japan having refused to do so and in the “name of the higher cause” to stay focused on. That in turn caused me to think that that so-called higher cause is of the “me, myself, and I; and screw caring about others” paradigm.
In terms of helping the poor to have access to education and preferably of qualitative kind, the above higher cause sort of outlook could be “oh, but it’ll cost us money, so it is not profitable to help the poor; let’em suffer, for we have to think about ourselves first and foremost, if not solely!”.
That of course is the paradigm of the the ruling elites of the U.S. govt, just that they haven’t formally named their philosophy; instead trying to live it out secretly.
The above about the Japanese who live by the higher cause paradigm and selfishly may seem to be very sarcastic, nearly of a racist kind of sarcasm, on my part; but it’s definitely not the intent. I really wonder if it simply does not have this sort of influence, to believe and live by such a philosophy.
The part about the U.S. ruling elites surely won’t seem at all sarcastic, for we KNOW that they are of this higher cause sort of mentality, and Henry Kissinger, Rothschild, and Rockefeller (David I believe) made this very clear, actually. Kissinger did this when he was quoted in saying what his view of soldiers is, and he said that they’re just “DUMB ANIMALS”, dumb animals to serve the whims of the ruling elites, very expendably. Rothschild did it when he said that he did not want to be part of govt, but to have control of a lot of wealth, and he’d then be able to control govts. Rockefeller did it when he spoke of critics saying that his family is for forming one world govt, etc., and that if it’s indeed the charge against them, then he’s guilty and proud of it.
They all made it unmistakably clear that they perceive themselves as ABOVE ALL OTHERS. So the latter can never be members of the higher cause class; only slavish servants to or for that class.
Francis of Assasi, former Archbishop Oscar Romero, and many others provided examples of living by a polar-opposite definition of the higher cause paradigm; theirs placing peace and justice, humanity, and God above all else, and thereby inherently meaning that this is the BEST way for one’s own soul. Their higher cause paradigm is the fully holistic kind; as opposed to the above examples of the narcissistic, selfish, … “alternative”, mutually-exclusive alternative. Mutually exclusive for we can’t live by both definitions. We can think that we, au contrair, can live by both definitions and wholly integrally, but I think if we analyse this critically and fully, then we will arrive at the opposite conclusion; that we can only live by one of the definitions of higher cause in really integral terms.
Holism is the way to be fully integral.
Socio-psychology is involved. For some Japanese, the manner of Francis of Assisi and so on is THE WAY to think of the higher cause; while for other Japanese persons, they will be or are like the Kissingers, Rothschilds, etc.
The latter seems, to me, to be involved in the refusal to help the poor have access to education; and making it all the worse is that many or most of these poor people are not responsible for their poverty, instead being victims of predatory humans who are selfish, narcissistic, … as … hell. They don’t care that their ways are DESTRUCTIVE; only caring about themselves. They only care about others as long as they’re useful for the achievements of agendas, personal objectives of becoming ever more wealthy and influentially powerful. As soon as these instrumental others are no longer useful, then they are or become expendable; the “use and then discard”, say, paradigm.
Alas, it’s nothing new. There was extreme poverty and unnecessarily so throughout much if not ALL of human history. And as I’ve said many times in the past, we may have developed technologies in recent times, but humans have NOT really changed. Humanity itself is really no more advanced today than in the past; and we have become worse than ever before in very important respects.
Where do I find [civilisation] by far most of all? Among the unnecessarily and unjustly impoverished, etc.; definitely not among the materially comfortable, not those of luxurious comfort anyway. They’re not civilised; they’re dehumanised.
This, what I am saying does not apply to ALL Japanese persons, citizens or born and/or living abroad, but might this stinginess on the part of the govt of Japan be related to the explicit Japanese principle of needing to always stay focused on the “higher cause”, or whatever they name it; same meaning, but perhaps by called a little differently?
I noticed it again with respect to whether or not they should protest against the war on Iraq, some citizens of Japan having refused to do so and in the “name of the higher cause” to stay focused on. That in turn caused me to think that that so-called higher cause is of the “me, myself, and I; and screw caring about others” paradigm.
In terms of helping the poor to have access to education and preferably of qualitative kind, the above higher cause sort of outlook could be “oh, but it’ll cost us money, so it is not profitable to help the poor; let’em suffer, for we have to think about ourselves first and foremost, if not solely!”.
That of course is the paradigm of the the ruling elites of the U.S. govt, just that they haven’t formally named their philosophy; instead trying to live it out secretly.
The above about the Japanese who live by the higher cause paradigm and selfishly may seem to be very sarcastic, nearly of a racist kind of sarcasm, on my part; but it’s definitely not the intent. I really wonder if it simply does not have this sort of influence, to believe and live by such a philosophy.
The part about the U.S. ruling elites surely won’t seem at all sarcastic, for we KNOW that they are of this higher cause sort of mentality, and Henry Kissinger, Rothschild, and Rockefeller (David I believe) made this very clear, actually. Kissinger did this when he was quoted in saying what his view of soldiers is, and he said that they’re just “DUMB ANIMALS”, dumb animals to serve the whims of the ruling elites, very expendably. Rothschild did it when he said that he did not want to be part of govt, but to have control of a lot of wealth, and he’d then be able to control govts. Rockefeller did it when he spoke of critics saying that his family is for forming one world govt, etc., and that if it’s indeed the charge against them, then he’s guilty and proud of it.
They all made it unmistakably clear that they perceive themselves as ABOVE ALL OTHERS. So the latter can never be members of the higher cause class; only slavish servants to or for that class.
Francis of Assasi, former Archbishop Oscar Romero, and many others provided examples of living by a polar-opposite definition of the higher cause paradigm; theirs placing peace and justice, humanity, and God above all else, and thereby inherently meaning that this is the BEST way for one’s own soul. Their higher cause paradigm is the fully holistic kind; as opposed to the above examples of the narcissistic, selfish, … “alternative”, mutually-exclusive alternative. Mutually exclusive for we can’t live by both definitions. We can think that we, au contrair, can live by both definitions and wholly integrally, but I think if we analyse this critically and fully, then we will arrive at the opposite conclusion; that we can only live by one of the definitions of higher cause in really integral terms.
Holism is the way to be fully integral.
Socio-psychology is involved. For some Japanese, the manner of Francis of Assisi and so on is THE WAY to think of the higher cause; while for other Japanese persons, they will be or are like the Kissingers, Rothschilds, etc.
The latter seems, to me, to be involved in the refusal to help the poor have access to education; and making it all the worse is that many or most of these poor people are not responsible for their poverty, instead being victims of predatory humans who are selfish, narcissistic, … as … hell. They don’t care that their ways are DESTRUCTIVE; only caring about themselves. They only care about others as long as they’re useful for the achievements of agendas, personal objectives of becoming ever more wealthy and influentially powerful. As soon as these instrumental others are no longer useful, then they are or become expendable; the “use and then discard”, say, paradigm.
Alas, it’s nothing new. There was extreme poverty and unnecessarily so throughout much if not ALL of human history. And as I’ve said many times in the past, we may have developed technologies in recent times, but humans have NOT really changed. Humanity itself is really no more advanced today than in the past; and we have become worse than ever before in very important respects.
Where do I find [civilisation] by far most of all? Among the unnecessarily and unjustly impoverished, etc.; definitely not among the materially comfortable, not those of luxurious comfort anyway. They’re not civilised; they’re dehumanised. As soon as we disregard the needs of the poor, we morally dehumanise ourselves. We become EMPTY SHELLS; soulLESS.
Good point robinea.