The Beautiful Tree (33 page)

The issue of not everyone being able to afford tuition fees for private schools is an important one. But why would this be viewed, other things being equal, as an objection to a greater role for private education? If private schools have all the above-listed advantages over state schools, with regard to quality and accountability, why would we see the tuition fee problem as such a huge obstacle? We shouldn’t, for there is the obvious possibility of creating
targeted
vouchers or scholarships for the poorest, or for girls, which overcomes the objection. The UNDP seems to agree that this is a possible way forward. In a section of a recent report, “Making Private Provision Work for Poor People,” it notes: “Public funding of private schools can help in certain circumstances. . . . To ensure that children from poor families unable to pay school fees are able to attend private schools, governments could finance their education through vouchers.” It gives the example of vouchers targeted at the poor in Colombia for secondary schools that helped “expand schooling at lower cost for the government, because the only cost the government bears is the voucher.”

Similarly, the World Bank, noting the difficulties of the political “long route” to accountability, says, “Given the weaknesses in the long route of accountability, service outcomes can be improved by strengthening the short route—by increasing the client’s power over providers.” It too gives the example of targeted vouchers, which enable clients “to exert influence over providers through choice.” This will allow parents a choice of providers so that they can “vote with their feet.” “The competition created by client choice also disciplines providers. . . . Reimbursing schools based on the number of students (or female students) they enrol creates implicit competition among schools for students, increasing students’ choice.”

And
The Oxfam Education Report
also notes the success of two targeted voucher programs, the aforementioned in Colombia and one in Pakistan that targets the poorest and most disadvantaged, girls, enabling them to attend private schools. Surely these are positive ways forward that could embrace the choices that parents seem to want to make, and help extend them to everyone? No, for the author, they are just short-term expedients: although he agrees that “support for good-quality private providers can create equity gains,” this must be viewed as only “a transitional arrangement in countries where public education systems are failing to reach the poor.” But that is all they can be: “In terms of achieving the 2015 target of universal primary education, there is no alternative to comprehensive public provision of good-quality basic education. Private-public partnerships have a role to play in some countries, but only at the margin. They do not solve the problem of mass exclusion, and do not diminish State responsibility for providing education for all.”

Why is this position so obvious that it is the one reached by apparently all the development experts, even those who acknowledge that private schools for the poor exist, and that targeted vouchers are a possibility? It didn’t seem obvious to me in the context of the evidence I’d found around the world. Even if you are pro-poor, there didn’t seem to be any reason to accept that tuition fees are an impassable obstacle to harnessing private schools for the poor as a path to universal education. There is an obvious solution to this problem—targeted vouchers.

So the third “good reason” didn’t seem to me to be good enough either.

What about human rights? The fourth “good reason” is that education “is a fundamental human right.” Both the World Bank and the UNDP spell this out as a major objection to private education playing a role in education for all. But what role does this imply for governments, and does it rule out private education’s playing a significant role in promoting education as a human right?

Interestingly, when I looked up the academic literature on the subject, I found two versions of the rights-based commitment to education that were adopted by the international community in 2000. The second Millennium Development Goal commits governments to “ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere . . . will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.” Then there is the second goal of the Dakar Framework for Action, commonly known as the “education for all” (EFA) goal, which commits signatories (principally governments and nongovernmental organizations) to ensure “that by 2015 all children . . . have access to and complete,
free
and compulsory primary education of good quality.”

Now the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, the champion of the EFA goal, is adamant that the education MDG is only “different in detail, but not in intent” from its own EFA goals. But clearly I could see there was a crucial difference. Under the MDG version, governments are only committed to ensuring that all children have
access
to primary schooling; it says nothing about whether it should be
free
. Under this goal, then, it doesn’t seem to rule out that the human right of education could be met, in full or in part, by fee-paying private schools, if everyone could obtain access to them—perhaps by providing targeted vouchers to those who could not afford fees. So the MDG version would
not
be an objection to private education playing an important role in providing “education for all.”

However, the Dakar Framework version is more particular. Here, the commitment
is
to
free
primary education. On the face of it— the criticism that the young woman threw at me at the Oxford conference—the EFA goal clearly provides an impossible stumbling block to private-sector involvement. If primary education must be
free
, then of course this rules out a large role for private education. Is that enough to make all my evidence beyond the pale? I think if we look at the
motivations
behind the Dakar Framework, we can see that, in intent, if not precise wording, it is not incompatible with private fee-paying education.

For UNESCO helpfully published an expanded commentary, meant to clarify any ambiguities within the framework. Here it notes that “user charges continue to be a major deterrent to poor children attending school,” and that education “must neither exclude nor discriminate.” Hence, it concludes, “Every government has the responsibility to provide
free
, quality basic education,
so that no child will be denied access because of an inability to pay
.” But this clarification surely reveals the true intentions behind “free” education: that
poverty
shouldn’t lead to any child being “denied access.” This is entirely different, of course, from requiring
no one
to pay fees. It could be perfectly compatible with this formulation of words to have fees at primary school, with the poorest being allocated targeted vouchers, as I’ve already discussed, so that they are not excluded by poverty.

This is further reinforced by UNESCO’s continued clarification as to why governments “must fulfil their obligation to offer free and compulsory primary education.” It writes: “
For the millions of children living in poverty
, who suffer multiple disadvantages, there must be an unequivocal commitment that education be free of tuition and other fees. . . .” Again, the commitment to free schooling seems to be for those who can’t afford even the low fees at budget private schools, not necessarily everyone. Again, targeted vouchers for the very poor to use for private schools could easily be permitted under this interpretation.

Moreover, it might again come as no surprise, given the discussion in the previous section on the range and quality of government provision, that the major reports from the UNDP and the World Bank say that, in reality, the fact that education is a human right doesn’t make much difference as far as government behavior is concerned: the World Bank reports that “many governments are falling short on their obligations, especially to poor people.” The UNDP points out, very significantly, that “public provision of social services is not always the best solution when institutions are weak and accountability for the use of public resources is low—often the case in developing countries.”

So again, what education as a human right means in practice for public and private involvement in education would seem to be an open, practical matter. In practice, if governments are not living up to their promises, then it surely is an open question whether the private sector is serving the “human right” better than the states. Again, the fourth “good reason” does not seem to be too powerful an objection either.

The final “good reason” was the one put to me by the Indian delegate at the conference, who said that I was trying to pull the ladder up behind me. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen espouses this position well. Taking to task some unnamed “market enthusiasts” who recommend to developing countries “that they should rely fully on the free market even for basic education,” he says that this “rather remarkable” approach would withhold “the very process of educational expansion that was crucial in rapidly spreading literacy in Europe, North America [and] Japan . . . in the past.” It was certainly not through the market, but through the state, that educational expansion was achieved in the West, he says. And if it was good enough for the West, then it must be good enough for developing countries, too.

Amartya Sen isn’t alone in espousing this position. The World Bank also gave it as a “good reason” for the long route of accountability: “In practice no country has achieved significant improvement in . . . primary education without government involvement.” The UNDP agrees: “Only when governments intervened [in education] did these services become universal in Canada, Western Europe and the United States.”

However, I don’t think things are as clear-cut as these development experts believe. For a start, I’m not convinced that this was really the way education developed in the West. There is strong, if counterintuitive, evidence that universal primary school provision was more or less achieved in 19th-century England and America before the state got significantly involved, through private means, such as the church, philanthropy, and the much maligned “dame” schools, that is, private schools run by small-scale proprietors, much like the ones we see in the slums of developing countries today. Less controversially, I suspect, there can also be doubts about whether we in the West
are
actually enjoying education for all under our existing public school systems, once truancy and dropouts are taken into account.
²

More fundamentally, why does it
matter
what happened in the West? Can’t I throw the “imperialistic” label back at these critics who say that the only way forward for poorer nations is to follow what they imagine the West has done? In the foreword to
The Rough Guide to A Better World
, sponsored by the Department for International Development, Sir Bob Geldof notes that development sometimes—and “admirably”—succeeds in countries, by people “ignoring all the advice of ‘the experts’ and finding their own
culturally appropriate
model.” Perhaps “ol’ Bleak Bob” (his own self-appellation) has hit on something crucially relevant to our concerns here? If many poor parents, in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, are choosing private schools because public education clearly is not working for them, then perhaps this says something about the
cultural appropriateness
of the private model in their developing country context, and the inappropriateness of trying to do things in the contemporary Western way? At the very least, one might be open to this possibility.

Even if the West was won, educationally speaking, through public schooling, this would not in itself mean that it is the only, or the best, way forward for people in very different circumstances—with very corrupt and unresponsive governments, for instance. Perhaps what I was finding—so many poor parents choosing private schools because public education is not working—says something about the
cultural appropriateness
of the private model in developing countries, and the
in
appropriateness of trying to do things the current Western way? On this ground alone, I would have thought, the final “good reason” should be considered pretty insubstantial.

But hearing this criticism, I wondered how
were
people being educated in developing countries
before
the Western powers colonized them? People I’d spoken to on my journey clearly carried the assumption that the colonized peoples simply weren’t being educated at all until the imperialists arrived. I heard Claire Fox, director of the London-based Institute of Ideas, whose radical views I usually found inspiring and palatable, tell a conference that there wasn’t much she liked about Western imperialism in India, but one of the few good things it did bring was education to the previously uneducated masses. Funnily enough, I heard the same thing from the elderly guide at the first-ever primary school in Nigeria, St. Thomas School, founded in 1845, on the edge of the coconut tree-lined lagoon in Badagry, Lagos State. He showed me around a rather ordinary-looking whitewashed brick building, with planks, hinges, doors, and corrugated roof all imported from England, still standing after 159 years. Upstairs was the room that contained the first Bible imported from England to Nigeria, a tatty book with the first chapters of Genesis and all of Revelation missing, and the first Bible translated into Yoruba. Downstairs was the room where a Mr. Philipson, the first Western teacher in Nigeria, had lived for 23 years; he had started the school across the compound with 40 children. The school had soon been inundated with children, my guide told me, so the rule had been devised—a rule in existence until as late as 1989—that required a child to reach his hand over to touch his opposite shoulder before he could be admitted to school, something, apparently, that children younger than five cannot do. It was the most extraordinary place. My guide told me, “The British brought with them three good things to Nigeria: Christianity, Agricultural Science, and Education.” “And,” he emphasized, “all three began here.”