The Commonwealth, education and UN's Millennium Development Goals

A recent pre-CHOGM forum, jointly organised by the Commonwealth Consortium for Education and the University's Faculty of Education, as part of the Commonwealth People's Forum, focused on the implementation of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in education.

The eight MDGs are: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV and malaria diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, developing a global partnership for development.

The eight Millennium Goals have been accepted by most nations. They have often been decried for being too vague and hardly ambitious. Others have argued that they do not get to the root causes of much of what is wrong with a world that has been characterised, and alas continues to be characterised, by an unequal distribution of resources and by a colonial legacy that makes itself present in a variety of forms not least through what is termed "globalisation from above".

"Globalisation from above" is used with reference to the dominant form of globalisation; it refers to policies and processes that advance the interest of the economically more developed countries, and trans-national corporations, and promotes the view that market forces should take precedence over policies that advocate the needs of people, especially the poor.

It is very unlikely that any of these millennium development goals will be accomplished satisfactorily by the target date of 2015 or even much later if we persist with the kind of economic policies that continue to place profit before people. For these challenges to start being confronted seriously, certain drastic actions need to be taken.

Unless the institutions which support "globalisation from above", namely the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are brought to their senses and stop supporting neo-liberal policies that continue to SAP Africa, the Caribbean and other victims of European colonial power of their life through their so-called Structural Adjustment Programmes, we will not have effective and well funded educational programmes that promote greater social justice, greater knowledge concerning health and environmental issues and the development of effective means of distributing resources internally.

Only through policies which help us conceive of education as a public and not a consumer good can one start to effectively educate with the achievement of these and alternative goals in mind. Only through the signing and close observations, by every government including that of the world's only superpower, of accords such as the Kyoto Protocol will educational programmes for "greater environmental sustainability" gain greater meaning. And such treaties need to be rendered accessible and widely disseminated. They cannot remain couched in a language understood only by experts, mainly scientists and economists.

Only through policies that shackle the arms industry that exploits tribal and ethnic conflicts through its sale of conventional weapons and supports autocratic regimes, can we go some way towards tackling some of the proposed and alternative goals. This should be part of a process that makes countries stricken by poverty and by unequal resource distribution to spend more on educational programmes and less on repressive measures including incarceration and the buying of weapons.

Only through a global process of education worldwide that enables us to engage with history and economics critically, to understand the processes involved that have led to an unequal global distribution of resources, and a broad-based non-Eurocentric humanistic education, can we seek to combat such current malaises as widespread racism and xenophobia on the one hand and unscrupulous 'racist' employment policies on the other. These types of education will hopefully take us some way towards a "global partnership for development" - a genuine programme of education for solidarity across regional, national and international, including North-South, borders.

An investment in educational programmes in areas and regions of the world that are marked by extreme poverty should be complemented by investment policies that will provide a better match between skills and jobs in the same areas and regions. This would help prevent the recurring 'brain drain' resulting from what is effectively a process of "education for export", the process that has characterised colonial and neo-colonial policies to date.

In this regard, economic power blocs such as the EU and the US need to revise their 'fortress' economic and agrarian policies for the way they impinge negatively on economic development in Africa and elsewhere. With a daily billion-dollar subsidy provided by the wealthy countries to their farmers, people from poor countries that depend on agriculture will find it hard to feed and educate their children.

We need to avoid an approach to education that exalts only one type of knowledge, invariably knowledge derived from the western and northern hemispheres, as "official and legitimate knowledge" and marginalises knowledge deriving from south of the equator areas, including indigenous knowledge and educational traditions.

The marginalisation and denigration of knowledge from the South is one of the legacies of colonialism that still has to be confronted adequately since it perpetuates a culture whereby people and agencies from this region of the world are represented in terms of a 'deficit' model. It is the sort of model that portrays them as people who should be held wholly responsible for their plight. Besides, individuals and institutions that are now finding some of this knowledge profitable should not be allowed to privately patent it, without providing compensation to the people who have been developing this knowledge over the years.

Related to this is the consideration that western models of development, including those that entail gender mainstreaming (one ought to remark that development models are not gender neutral), do not necessarily work in some of the contexts that are hardest hit by poverty. There needs to be recognition and support for agencies (including NGOs), from the area, committed to addressing such issues as women's issues, AIDS/HIV, environmental issues, agrarian economic development, etc.

These agencies are more likely than their Western counterparts to have an intimate knowledge of the cultural contexts in question. They and other international organisations and movements, including many situated in the west, play a major role in monitoring compliance of governments regarding the MDGs and advocating for more and better aid (in the early seventies, the wealthiest nations had committed themselves to 0.7% of their GDP to be reserved for international aid), 'justice in trade' (fair trade) and debt write off as key to the attainment of the proposed and alternative goals.

In so doing, organisations such as these engage, through a series of local/global linkages, in what is referred to as "globalisation from below". This consists of an international networking of groups and social movements that engage in acts of resistance against and offer alternatives to the dominant form of globalisation referred to earlier, one which, to echo the Portuguese sociologist and legal expert, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (see his interview with Roger Dale and Susan Robertson in Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2, 2, 2004), marginalises a number of people and regions through the unequal exchange it produces.

Professor Peter Mayo teaches Sociology of Education and coordinates the Adult Education programme in the Faculty of Education, University of Malta. This article is based on his concluding comments, as chairman, at the plenary session of the pre-CHOGM Commonwealth People's Forum on the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals in Education.