Educação em África

Numa altura em que se discute quantos mil milhões de dólares os países ricos devem doar e que se aproxima o Live 8, James Bartholomew publica um texto no Telegraph sobre o efeito de se financiar sistemas de ensino estatais e gratuitos no contexto africano. O texto também pode ser lido no seu site "The Welfare State We're In".

Professor James Tooley of Newcastle University has done a study of schooling in Africa and discovered something that will come as a surprise to many. There are a huge number of private schools there catering for the poor that do not appear in official statistics. They are not regulated and inspected or anything like that. Yet many extremely poor parents in the shanty town of Makoko on the Lagos lagoon in Nigeria make great financial sacrifices to send their children to them.###

The danger to Africa is that if Messrs Brown and Blair persuade other members of the G8 to give, say, $7 billion a year to Africa to promote free education, it will have an unintended consequence. Many of the poor parents who send their children to fee-paying, private schools will be tempted to send them to a vastly increased number of free state schools. In the process, the fee-paying schools will be driven out of business or dramatically reduced in size.

What's wrong with that, you might ask?

The problem is that the state schools are nothing like as good at delivering education as the private schools. Prof Tooley organised tests of 3,000 children at a random selection of state and fee-paying schools in Lagos. In every subject, children at the fee-paying schools did considerably better.