The Emerging World: American Opportunity: Part 4

Rules of the Road for American participation in the development of the Emerging World: Point #3: Global education access and advanced development of education reforms.

Global education access refers to the inherent rights of all people on Earth to have a quality education. The efforts of governments and citizens should be to expand access and improve quality. Embedded in the Title of this post is the 2007 UNESCO study on education statistics through out the world titled "Global Education Digest. The details of the report, which centers on early development/primary education, essentially reveals that "global spending on education is concentrated in a handful of more developed countries. For example, the United States, which is home to just 4% of the world's population aged 5-25 years, accounts for more than one-quarter of the global education budget." 

This statistic represents two unfortunate realities: 

1) considering the deterioration in America's standing in the world (in regards to its percentage per capita performance in: math, science, reading, high school graduation, college graduation, etc.) it is obvious that we aren't legislating or implementing an effective education system here at home, especially when placed in the performance criteria of competency vs. spending.

2) the United States and the United Nations will be unable to help the developing world achieve any significant progress towards economic or stability goals without massive funding and program improvements to the eduction systems in those developing countries. 

Economic success on the regional and global stage is directly related to the total %GDP spent on national education, and qualitative improvements in performance which can be measured by a world standard per capita competency testing regime.  If you examine the figures of the poorest and slowest to develop nations in the world, you will notice startling under-performance not just of %GDP education spending as a global standard, but also as a regional one. Funding needs to be allocated not just for teachers, but for technology, school safety, infrastructure, schools construction generally, food, water, basic vaccinations etc. 

Adults looking to compete in an increasingly global market place will need to have access to affordable continued education, in institutions that are properly prepared to provide them with that education. The developing world has so little of these programs, that until we work to role out a massive set of reforms and funding for this work, we will have little effectiveness even trying to perform generational education triage, let alone provide for all under-served people. 

Education provides the backbone for economic viability, stability of nationhood, constitutional reforms, and even liberalizing of societies. Look at the worst failed states in our world, everyone ranks below average, regionally(!!), on the education funding and standards statistics. This is no coincidence, and needs to be reversed if we are to succeed in improving our world.