THE WAY FORWARD
"Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.”
Daniel Boorstin, American Historian
Quality education is essential to escaping poverty and achieving many other Alleem Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, we are still a long way from achieving inclusive and quality education for all and promoting lifelong learning.
Let me share with you some of the latest figures and facts published by the United Nations about quality education. Globally, an estimated 617 million children and adolescents of primary and lower secondary school age—more than 55 percent of the global total—lacked minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics in 2015. Non-proficiency rates are highest in sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Southern Asia, where more than 80 percent of children of primary and lower secondary school age were not proficient in reading.
Let me ask you, what would you do for education? Do you have any plan in place? Well, I have selected for you two inspiring stories of children who wanted to make a difference and continue their education under very tough environments and circumstances. Their stories might leave you in veneration.
STORY #1: ZIPLINING OVER A CANYON
In 2011, WISE—World Innovation Summit for Education— produced a documentary on the children of Los Pinos, Colombia. Los Pinos’s school was closed due to a lack of funding, leaving students with two options to get to the next nearest school. These young children could either walk two hours both ways, or ride a zipline across a deep canyon to get to school.
According to an article posted by Global Citizen on January 19, 2018, "for families living atop an isolated mountain high above the Rio Negro River in Colombia’s rainforest, steel cables provide the most efficient route to reach other communities. The zipline phenomena traces back centuries. Natives used to rely on hemp ropes to journey across the canyon. While soaring through the air on their way to school, ziplining students can reach speeds up to 40 mph.”
STORY #2: THE TREACHEROUS CLIFFS
There is one more story of traversing over treacherous cliffs for a commute that I would like to share with my dear reader. In the mountains of southwest China’s Sichuan province, a group of children must descend an 800-meter (half mile) cliff to reach their school. There are no buses for school kids. There aren’t even roads. Instead, students scramble up a series of rickety wooden ladders propped against sheer cliffs. After photos of children making the perilous trip went viral, the Chinese government funded the construction of steel ladders secured to the mountainside. As per a news article posted by CNN on October 26, 2016, "the world’s most terrifying school run is about to get a little less hair raising as now a steel ladder is being built to make the treacherous journey from the isolated cliff-top village of Atule’er easier.”