Without Borders | Education often a casualty
Where humanitarian crises exist, children are likely to be deprived of the basic learning they need so urgently.
In developing countries, millions of children only dream about going to primary school. The violence and poverty in their homelands often force them to work rather than attend class.
The International Labor Organization estimates that 180 million youngsters between the ages of 5 and 17 - 73 percent of all child laborers worldwide - are engaged in the most hazardous types of child labor. If they're going to work, they probably aren't going to school.
In Peru, children crush rocks and use toxic mercury to extract the gold inside. Throughout Asia and Africa, they go underground into mines. Children as young as 5 stand in fields and hold flags to show airplane pilots overhead where to drop pesticides. They carry coal, rocks and bricks on their heads, endangering their skeletal development. Girls, whose parents often prevent them from going to school, are trafficked into slavery as domestic servants and prostitutes.
The children's work in conflict zones is deadly. Government armies and rebel groups force children to be soldiers. The technical term is "child recruitment" - as though a Darfur boy quivering in a refugee camp could politely refuse heavily armed men who arrive at the tent of what's left of his family and tell him to fight or die.
Education is an early and chronic casualty of conflict. About 43 million youngsters don't go to school because they live in war zones.
On the phone from Kathmandu, Tory Lawson of Save the Children U.S. told me that during 10 years of civil war in Nepal, "Schools, hundreds of them, closed for long periods of time. Kids were abducted; teachers were abducted and killed. People lost belongings and couldn't afford school. . . . There weren't enough classrooms, teachers or benches."
Maoist rebels used schools to spread their anti-American propaganda (just as extremist Islamists teach hatred in their classrooms). Since the war's end last year, Nepal's education system has undergone great change. Save the Children is promoting a model that, in addition to the normal curriculum, welcomes all children and teaches tolerance and peaceful conflict resolution.
Families in Nepal are eager for their children to be back in class. Schools, as they do even in Philadelphia, represent havens of stability. Education is an effective antidote to child labor, disease, violence and poverty.
"Education is a fundamental element of a peaceful routine," said Dana Burde, a visiting assistant professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, who has focused on education in crises.
Though education is like air to children in emergencies, very little U.S. foreign aid funding goes to education programs during humanitarian crises. Of course, money has to be spent on food, shelter and medicine during tumultuous times. But people can be in emergency settings for months and years. Education needs to be considered one of the basics of an international emergency response.
A number of international nongovernmental organizations are pressing for increased attention to education around the world. The Group of Eight industrialized nations, which includes the United States, pledged to give more aid for education in impoverished countries to move closer to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. One of those goals is to achieve universal basic education by 2015.
The Education for All Act, which has bipartisan support, is pending in the U.S. House (H.R. 2092) and Senate (S. 1259). One of its provisions would make a priority of maintaining schools during humanitarian crises. More money for basic education programs also could come out of the fiscal year 2008 budget process Congress has yet to complete. It's hard to fathom why any lawmaker would be against making such a smart investment when the benefits of educating children - in Philadelphia or abroad - are so great.
For "Rewrite the Future: Education and Hope for Millions of Children Affected by Armed Conflict," see http://go.philly.com/rewritefuture
For information on the Basic Education Coalition, see http://www.basiced.org
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