ABSTRACT
Education for All emerged as a global imperative from the 1990 International Conference on Education, held in Jomtien, Thailand. Ten years later, precisely in April 2000, about 1,100 participants from 164 countries gathered in Dakar, Senegal, to take stock of progress made towards meeting this imperative. At the Dakar summit, it was established that there had been remarkable progress in terms of increased access, but that quality, measured by achievement scores in reading, writing, arithmetic and problem-solving (i.e. the basic learning tools) and internal efficiency among others, was abysmally low, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Various evaluations, e.g. UNESCO’s Monitoring Learning Achievement (MLA), the Programme d’analyse des systèmes éducatifs de la CONFEMEN (PASEC) and the Southern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ), have shown that most students in this part of the world leave primary school with very limited or even no mastery of the basic learning tools. As well, because of its current nature, school does not help them learn how to learn and tends to alienate them from their socio-cultural environment. Such findings are all the more preoccupying as for the vast majority of these children, primary school is involuntarily a terminal cycle (note that a significant number of them drop out before reaching grade 6). In other words, one can argue that the current school systems are preparing future illiterates. The cost of this wastage is estimated at more than 25 per cent of financial resources allocated to primary education. It is therefore not surprising that quality was the dimension most strongly emphasised by the Dakar summit in pursuing the new goal of EFA by 2015 (Ndoye, 2002).
