The 24th of January was International Day of Education. It is a moment to acknowledge that accessible and equitable education is a human right, providing it is a public responsibility. It is a call to raise awareness about how it contributes to sustainable development, ending inequalities, peace, and development.
The 2023 theme was ‘to invest in people, prioritise education’. It begs that we ask, what creates inequalities and barriers to accessing education? Who cannot access quality education? Who are the people who need the investment, and where are they? What are the investments? And what kind of education should be prioritised?
I write this reflecting on a seminar I attended at Salzburg Global seminar ‘Education Transformation and Gender: Better Outcomes for Everyone’ in December 2022. And the conversations we had. The seminar brought together an intergenerational and multi-disciplinary group of around 50 change-makers from different parts of the world invested in transforming education systems with a focus on gendered inequalities. Throughout the week we shared our thoughts, and the work we are doing in line with education transformation and took our ideas for a walk. I kept asking myself how we can ensure that transforming education systems makes education a channel for liberation. And I found myself return to this question in light of International Day of Education.
Where Are We Now?
Globally education systems reflect the world, a world built on inequalities. People from marginalised communities, particularly Black and Brown girls, women and gender-diverse people, experience inequitable learning opportunities and barriers to accessing educational resources. According to UNICEF, 244 million children and youth are out of school, and 771 million adults cannot read or write. The World Economic Forum reported that COVID-19 lockdowns left around 1.5 billion learners in 188 countries unable to attend school in person. Many are burdened by the digital divide which is disproportionately gendered. The setback will have long-lasting consequences. In March 2022, UNICEF reported that there were a handful of schools in 23 countries that had not reopened since COVID-19 imposed lockdowns. This affects over 405 million schoolchildren.
It is important to remember that there are millions of learners, including schoolchildren, adolescents and young adults excluded from these stats. They live in the margins and are perpetually invisibilised. These numbers seldom apply context-specific analysis or include asylum seekers, refugees, learners in rural areas, learners with disabilities, learners from racial minority groups, learners living in war-torn countries and LGBTQ people who do not attend school out of fear and/or because their needs are not met. Irrespective of our efforts to transform education systems and in the absence of critical analysis, if those who are overlooked do not benefit and cross the finish line, we will fall short.
Barriers to accessing education maintain and reproduce systems of oppression and intersecting inequalities at every level. The inaccessibility of inclusive and quality education is a force of violence that determines who matters, who deserves dignity, who deserves to be empowered and access to opportunities, and who deserves the privilege of choice through access to information. A transformed education system is one that is free from all forms of violence, grounded in inclusivity and accessibility, and context-specific. A transformed education system is liberating.
Nothing Exists In Isolation
The conversations that we had at the Salzburg Global seminar prioritised gendered inequalities in education. I agree gender plays a huge role in determining the trajectory of our lives. Schools and education play a role in maintaining gender inequalities and stereotypes so, those are conversations. However, that cannot be the highest level of analysis or intervention when thinking about transforming education systems.
Kimberly Crenshaw’s analytical framework intersectionality was evoked from time to time, hoping to encourage a holistic analysis of the problems and what needs to be done. Crenshaw warns us against single-issue analysis because it overlooks the fullness of peoples’ experiences and distracts us from thinking about how power works. She encourages us to use intersectionality as a starting point and a guide. We ground intersectionality in Black feminist theory, which is conscious of power and intersecting patterns of discrimination. Intersectionality encourages us to think about how race, class, gender, sexuality, religion and cultural practices, disability, location, nationality, and other identity markers intersect and overlap to inform peoples’ experiences and the different oppression they face.
Black girls in Niger face the reality that in their country about 17% of young women between the ages of 15 and 24 are literate. Because of homophobia, in 2021, Kenya’s cabinet secretary for education suggested that they should ban LGBTQ students from boarding schools. In countries like Qatar, Malawi, Tuvalu and Jamaica, where homosexuality and gender diversity are illegal or unacceptable, LGBTQ learners risk being imprisoned, fined, harmed or executed for living their truth. In 2022, South Africa’s government cut back the budget for basic education, disproportionately affecting racially marginalised learners, with gendered repercussions. Approximately one in four girls in India are married off before they turn 18 and once wedded, they are unlikely to return to school. Globally, learners with disabilities can not access education because we do not equip schools with facilities for them. Israel destroyed 50 schools in the Gaza Strip in 2021 during a week-long airstrike. In 2022, over 400 000 school-aged children were living in the Rohingya refugee camps. Half of them were girls. Rohingya girls face more barriers than boys to accessing the limited education available to them because of social and religious norms that limit the time they can spend outside of the home and who they socialise with. In 2021, the Taliban banned girls from attending secondary school. In December 2022, they banned women from universities, including students, teachers, and professors.
Single-issue approaches and analysis of education inequalities do very little. We cannot only focus on gender. Accurately identifying the investments needed and the education or pedagogies that should take priority need to be context-specific, holistic and learner-centred. Failure to do so puts us at risk of liberating a single demographic, which is more likely white girls, young women and gender-diverse people.
Decolonising To Shift Power
Although we are living in a post-colonial world, previously colonised countries are still dealing with the aftermath of colonialism. All inequalities are colonial residue. Classism, racism, Western-centric gendered norms, and homophobia, among other inequalities, can be traced back to colonial projects of domination. Introducing Western-centric education was critical to the colonial project, ongoing white supremacy and maintaining other systems of oppression. Like colonialism, education continues to be used to divide and conquer. It separates those who can access power through education and those who cannot, liberating some and mentally oppressing others.
Transforming education systems requires decolonising them. Those of us who were previously colonised need to look back to reclaim and learn about what we lost and continue to take to survive. We need to reconnect with indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling, pedagogies, and our cultures and learn about our histories, which have been erased and replaced which Western-centric norms. Decolonising education needs to happen at every level – psychosocially, communally, nationally, and in and out of the classrooms. Transformation should include reimagining curriculums; and creating spaces and resources for dialogue among communities, teachers, learners, stakeholders and leaders to envision holistic and inclusive liberation. The process and practice of decolonising is a liberation project that creates education systems and environments that we do not need to heal from.
Policies Are Not Enough
Education is a complex system with many interconnected subsystems and stakeholders. It is a matrix of power. Any decision taken for one component on one level affects other elements and millions of people. And the country at large. This interconnectedness requires policies and decision-makers to ensure that they put strategic and liberating frameworks and policies in place to push for transformation that makes inclusive and quality education accessible. This also decentralises power and challenges inequalities.
Emerging challenges like digitalisation; persistent inequalities, and disruptions caused by conflicts, climate change and pandemics demand that countries prioritise learners’ and teachers’ well-being along with proactive, resilient, sustainable and gender-transformative policies, interventions and strategies that decentralise power to create efficient, inclusive, context-specific, and liberating education systems and environments.
Transformation as a liberating process and practice need to be a team effort between governments, stakeholders, cultural and religious leaders, communities, parents, caregivers, teachers and learners working together to identify challenges and areas for improvement. Collectively, we should strategise, make decisions, identify focal points and demographics that need resources and interventions, allocate resources, and monitor and evaluate progress. It is important that the voices, experiences, and thoughts of young people and teachers, particularly those from marginalised communities take centre stage. They are at the centre of the problems, living through them, and are in the best position to determine what they need.
A liberated And Liberating System
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom bell hooks argues that teachers should use the classroom [and education] as a space to transgress and to push against and move beyond the boundaries of traditional education models. She wrote “education is about the practice of freedom … The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility.”
Transforming education systems is an ongoing process, a messy journey that is complex and exhausting at times with no stopping point. It is a commitment to embrace change, decolonise, think holistically and collaboratively, and bring those in the margins to the centre using the past as a guiding force and the future as something that holds the promise of hope. Transforming education systems, identifying the sweet spots for investments, and thinking critically about what and whose education we prioritise is the practice of ending inequalities, and creating liberating education systems and environments charged with possibilities.