Access to Education by Lori Schroeder
With the recent fiasco over the financial cliff, student aid has recently survived its first encounter with the spotlight and has remained largely intact. While the degree to which existing programs will continue is yet unknown, it seems that, for the moment, student aid has received a short relief. According to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators website, an estimated 9.4 million students are currently receiving help from the federal government.
The current threat has made many students very aware of how fortunate they are that college education has been accessible to them. This is not the case throughout the world. In fact, education at a primary level is still denied to many around the globe. In 2009, sixty-seven million primary age school children were not attending class of any kind according to an education access report completed by The World Bank’s EdStats.
According to EdStats in a world-wide survey of 149 countries, twenty-four countries have literacy rates below seventy-five percent. A large contributor to this number is a lack of primary education. While the United States has compulsory education for an average of twelve years (the real number differs by state), many countries have no such requirement and provide no free schooling. In fact, worldwide, EdStats founds that the number one reason why education is not available is low income. Regardless of the differences in the quality of primary school education across the United States, the fact that public school is free allows all students to attend classes.
The second indicator of school attendance worldwide was rural locations. While living in the country in Wisconsin may have meant a long bus ride or carpool to school, in many countries around the world, such a distance prohibited any classroom learning. Twelve percent fewer rural students in Sub-Saharan Africa attended school than urban students.
Of the estimated 67 million school age children who were recorded as not attending any form of school in 2009, more than half were females. Many regions do not believe that women should receive an education and ban them from doing so. In other regions, such as Niger where less than a quarter of the female population are literate, women are required to do other tasks such as fetching water and cooking, thus making them unable to attend school. The Women’s Global Education Project works to provide schooling for women in areas where attendance rates are low, such as Sub-Saharan Africa were less than fifty-seven percent of girls attend primary schooling. According to their website, the Women’s Global Education Project was “founded on the idea that everyone is entitled to an education, regardless of gender or economic status.”
Perhaps it is hard to imagine growing up without attending school on a regular basis, but the Unicef website addresses the global crisis of education access best. It is not only a matter of out of school children being denied learning; it about their future. The Unicef website reads, “[out of children] are being denied their basic human right to education, with far-reaching consequences: Without it, their future opportunities are dramatically limited. If schooling unlocks the gate to a bright and successful future, a childhood bereft of education erects nearly insurmountable barriers.”
