50 years for Education p.116

TOWARDS LIFELONG EDUCATION FOR ALL

BASIC EDUCATION, THE FOUNDATION OF LIFELONG EDUCATION

The founding fathers of UNESCO wished to impart ‘a fresh impulse to popular education and the spread of culture’ (Article I of the Constitution). In the working document prepared for the first session of the General Conference, Julian Huxley denounced as scandalous the existence of masses of human beings lacking the most basic elements necessary to participate in the modern world.
From that moment on, UNESCO committed itself to a whole range of activities to provide primary education for everyone, both through the school-ing of children and by means of literacy education for young people and adults. During the early years fundamental education was one of the corner-stones of UNESCO’s education policies. In 1946, the fundamental education programme was presented as an action of construction - the counterpart to reconstruction activities - for countries in Asia, in South America and in Africa where the majority of the population was still functionally illiterate. Fundamental education fell within a global approach: learning to read and write should lead to raised living standards, to stimulating citizenship and to more active participation in community life.
In 1958, fundamental education activities were, under the aegis the of United Nations, encompassed within a programme of concerted action for community development common to several agencies. The fight against illiteracy was from that moment on pursued by UNESCO, both within the framework of adult education, and within that of the goal of universal primary education for all. In 1990, the notion of basic (or fundamental) education was to be taken up again, and further enhanced, within the context of lifelong learning in the World Declaration on Education for All, where Article I declares that ‘Basic education is more than an end in itself. It is the foundation for lifelong learn-ing and human development on which countries may build, systematically, further levels and types of education and training.’

FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION... IN 1950
‘1,000 MILLION ILLITERATES: MORE THAN HALF THE ADULTS OF THE WORLD!’
This means that one thousand million men and women can neither read nor write. More than half the people of the world are also desperately poor. Their earnings are so low that their daily diet is barely enough to keep them alive. In the countries of Asia and Africa, where illiteracy is most prevalent, a child at birth can expect to live no more than thirty years, while in the countries of Western Europe, where a high proportion of the people are able to read and write, a child can expect to live 55 or more years. Illiteracy is part of a tragic circle of underproduction, malnutrition and endemic disease.
The circle cannot be broken by an attack on only one of these elements. It is useless to concentrate on improving health if inefficient farming methods and soil erosion are left unchecked and entire populations remain undernourished. It is equally useless to teach people to read and write unless they have an incentive to learn and use this knowledge. The only satisfactory incentive is an improvement in their daily lives. Nor can agricultural production be raised if disease and ignorance keep the people who work the land in a condition of physical and mental inertia.
These problems are too complex for traditional schoolroom methods used to teach children. They are problems affecting all sections of the population - children and adults, women as well as men - and they demand a much broader approach by the educator. During recent years, many people have taken such an approach in the world’s underdeveloped regions. They have called their work by various names, such as ‘mass education’, ‘basic education’, ‘cultural missions’ and ‘community development’. UNESCO which, since its foundation, has considered these problems to be its major challenge, uses the term ‘fundamental education’. The main purpose of fundamental education is to help people to understand their immediate problems and to give them the skills to solve them through their own efforts. It is an emergency solution designed to help masses of illiterate adults and children in countries whose educational facilities have been inadequate. It is an attempt to salvage a generation by giving it the minimum of education needed to improve its way of life, its health, its productivity and its social, economic and political organization.
Objective No. 1: to train 5,000 specialists
Until 1950, UNESCO’s fundamental education work, because of a limited budget, was experimental. The experiments, however, repeatedly produced the same conclusions, no matter where they were conducted. Fundamental education cannot help to achieve tangible results without men and materials; that is, without qualified workers and effective educational materials specifically designed for its task.
UNESCO has now put forward a plan to aid its Member States by helping to train fundamental education workers and by developing samples of the teaching materials they need. This plan is intended to operate as a twelve-year programme in which a world network of six production and training centres will be established in five regions - Latin America, Equatorial Africa, the Middle East, India and the Far East (where two centres will be set up).
Adapted from The UNESCO Courier, June 1951.
Chain reaction for peace. One of the novel features of UNESCO's world campaign against ignorance has been called 'training by chain reaction'. Specialists trained at six UNESCO fundamental education centres will return home to establish national and then local training centres, thus greatly multiplying the number of qualified personnel needed for this urgent drive against illiteracy and low living standards.

With a view to equity and democratization, the education of young people deprived of schooling, literacy education and basic adult education in a non-formal context on the one hand, and the gradual generalization of free and compulsory primary education on the other, constitute strategies for the Organization which, according to time and place, have sometimes been followed independently, sometimes explicitly articulated and co-ordinated in national and regional education plans.
Today, UNESCO’s Medium-Term Strategy 1996-2001 gives absolute priority to basic education for all - children, adolescents and adults, girls and boys, men and women. After the Jomtien Conference, which proposed an ‘expanded vision’, basic education is an integrated system with the following four main constituent principles:

the education of young children;
primary schooling and supplementary alternative programmes for those without access to it;
literacy education for young people and adults and their familiarization with the know-how of daily life;
educating the general public through systematic recourse to all channels of information, particularly targeting the disadvantaged.
The report of the Delors Commission, Learning: the Treasure Within considers basic education as a passport to life; the Independent Commission for Population and Quality of Life in its report Caring for the Future also published in 1996, recommends that the years 2001-2010 be proclaimed Universal Basic Education Decade. Basic education, whose origins lie in reflection which UNESCO instigated, is, thus, the starting point of a process of acquisition of knowledge which will last a lifetime.

1990
WORLD CONFERENCE ON EDUCATION FOR ALL
More than 100 million children, including at least 60 million girls, have no access to primary schooling, and more than 100 million adults fail to complete basic education; around a billion adults, two-thirds of whom are women, were still illiterate in 1990. The international community has reacted in a salutary manner to this dramatic situation.
The World Conference on Education for All has given fresh momentum to basic education. UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP and the World Bank jointly organized this Conference, which was hosted by the Royal Government of Thailand and co-sponsored by eighteen other governments and organizations at Jomtien, Thailand in March 1990.
After a week of deliberations, prepared by a vast process of regional consultations, delegations from 155 countries and very many international governmental and non-governmental organizations adopted a World Declaration on Education for All and approved a Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs. These two documents, which represent an expression of world consensus, reflect an expanded vision of basic education and a renewed commitment to provide a satisfactory response to the basic educational needs of all - children, young and adults, men and women, all over the world.
The rapresentative of the host country with the heads of the Agencies that organized the Conference