Global Report Card

In the schools of Africa, up to 81 % of the students drop out. In South Asia, many of those who graduate from college cannot find jobs. In Western Europe and the U.S., campus after campus was until recently torn apart by student protest. Meanwhile, around the world, there have been independent educational experiments--scuole senza muri (schools without walls) in Italy, radnicki universiteti (workmen's universities) in Yugoslavia, ensehanza en equipo (team teaching) in Spain, open schools in the U.S. Have such innovations helped education cure its ills and adapt to modern social and economic needs? If not, what might?

These were some of the questions asked by seven Establishment pedagogues from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas--among them, Frederick Champion Ward, an adviser to the Ford Foundation and former dean of the college at the University of Chicago. Headed by Edgar Faure, the former French Premier and Minister of Education who now serves as Minister of Social Affairs, the members spent 14 months and $400,000 analyzing education throughout the world. They visited 23 countries, interviewed scores of educators and solicited 81 special reports from such experts as Gunnar Myrdal, Jean Piaget, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich.

This month they will present their 313-page report* to delegates at a UNESCO conference in Paris.

The commission found that nearly all educational systems are antiquated -- even in developing countries, where they are modeled on those of the colonial powers. Most schools and colleges were designed several centuries ago to serve a social elite at a time when knowledge was slow to change. Today they are called upon to educate nearly everyone, and what they teach soon be comes obsolete because of the knowledge explosion. Nevertheless, the structures have remained largely un changed. As a result, the commission reported, "the system finds it difficult to keep up with the demands of an expanding society; the people it educates are not properly trained to adapt them selves to change, and some societies reject the qualifications and skills being offered when these no longer answer direct needs."

Thus, almost everywhere the com mission looked, it found students who were frustrated and confused "by the divorce between an outmoded education and the reality of the world around them." Even where there were no riots, there were other signs of disaffection, including apathy, which the commission interpreted as a token that "antiquated education systems are being rejected."

How to Learn. Nothing less than a complete refashioning of education will solve the problem, the commission concluded. Their long, somewhat obscurely written report, recognizing that no one system could fit all countries' needs, of fers no specific blueprint. It does sug gest, however, that all education should ideally be integrated with workaday life, using flexible, out-of-school approaches that make education start in very early childhood and end only with death.

To give an idea of what might be included, the commission cited the extensive kindergartens set up by Red China and the U.S.S.R., as well as the U.S. TV program Sesame Street. As models for later education, the report mentioned universities without walls in the U.S.

(TIME, Aug. 28) and Japan's vocational schools, which are sponsored by both government and industry.

However, such innovations will never be more than palliatives, the commission warned, unless they are part of a broad reform that makes the goal of education teaching people how to learn. Only then can education equip people "for adapting to change" and make it possible for them to keep up dating their skills and knowledge. Such a flexible notion of education is hard to dispute. The question is whether it can be useful in transforming institutions in such radically different settings -- all vis ited by the commissioners -- as Zaire, Sweden, Egypt, Peru, the U.S.S.R., Cameroun and the U.S.

* Available in the U.S. from Unipub; $6.

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