ABSTRACT
At Jomtien in 1990, the governments, international organisations and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) gathered for the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) jointly acknowledged that the aspiration for universal basic education had not been met. This failure was most evident with regard to people who were discriminated against, politically, socially, economically and culturally. Although the conference referred to this category as ‘marginal’ groups, their numbers were estimated in 1990 at well over a billion adults and children, amounting to at least one fifth of the world’s population (WCEFA 1990). They were thus not numerically ‘marginal’, but rather politically and culturally located outside the mainstream of what was seen to be the promise of the new decade and the century to come.
