'Institutionalizing Health and Education for All' is a book jointly produced by Colette Chabbott and Mushtaque Chowdhury which introduces the readers to the key international organizations and movements in the field of education for development; provides a unique interpretation of the many tensions that characterize the field governments vs non-government organizations; institutions vs actors; and loose coupling between policies and action; addresses the current debate about research methods in education, including quantitative indicators, randomized controlled trials, and case studies; and identifies new activities and potential directions related to the global goals phenomenon. It champions a healthy pragmatism in the pursuit of education reform and challenges the universalism that fuels impatience with context-contingent reforms. Ironically both pragmatism and universalism have standing in the wide world culture. Institutionalizing Health and Education for All: Global Goal, Innovations, and Scaling up is divided into eight chapters such as Introduction, imagining: From Universal Rights to Universal Goals, Inventing: Carrot Soup, Magic Bullets and Scientific Research, Adapting: A Tale of Two Sectors, Scaling up: Blueprints, Bureaucrats, and Babies in the Bathwater, Scaling out: From the Basket, Into the World, Reimagining: What can Data Do and Conclusions: Why compare?
This book offers many examples of how the universalistic authority of science can be linked to local realities in order to produce successful reforms. There are success stories, like how oral therapy education emerged and was scaled 'out of the basket and into the world.' and there are hopeful beginnings, like the rise and effort to institutionalize early-graders reading. For many in the international development community, some of whom played significant roles in constructing, promoting and implementing global goals. The MDGs promulgated following the UN Millennium Summit of 2000 consequently incorporated narrower health and education goals, largely focused on children, to be achieved by 2015. The authors ask a valid question whether education can learn something from health. The common sense and even the general readers who don't belong to the group of people who conduct research will give an answer which will tell 'YES'. Obviously the issues of health and education are interlinked.
There is no denying the fact that education is the key to individual and national development. Success at both the individual and national levels is to be attained and gauged through rational means anchored in the authority of science. Not surprisingly, much loose coupling takes place as reforms are imagined to be context. But the fact is context matters. What it takes to look externally legitimate is often inconsistent with what is locally feasible, and at times, desirable. This is a major issue throughout this book and one revisited in the conclusions chapter. Context here refers not only to national and sub-national contests, but also to organizational and sector contexts. Chabbott raises the question "Can education learn from health?" And offers a nuanced answer 'Yes, but not blindly'.
Both health and education are key to modern notions of national and individual prosperity. Global goals such as Health for All and Education for All represent efforts by international development organizations to hold governments accountable for their unprecedented global commitments to economic and social progress for all citizens. In the process, by intent or not, these organizations impose some small measures of rational coherence at the global level. The foundations for these goals lie in the various declarations of and covenants pertaining to human rights deriving from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and codified in the International Covenants of Civil and Political Rights and of Economics, Social and Cultural Rights, promulgated at the height of the Cold War. These covenants embody two notions that have roots in several cultures but clearly express core.
In 2015 the global community will ratify a new - or not so new - set of global development goals. It can be predicted with some confidence because the notion of global goals has become so institutionalized that an institutional scholar fully conscious of the socially constructed nature and weaknesses of those goals, finds it hard to imagine the international development community without them. Education will be featured in post-2015 global goals. In 2012 some remarks at high-level international meetings on post-2015 global goals suggested that education might not need to be included in those goals, given that many countries had met the education MDGs (Burnett 2012). For many in the global education community, and particularly those who had been scandalized by the low bar set by the education MDGs, this was a call to arms. In response, education experts began to meet to identify research that might strengthen the case for education and develop prototype goals. Support for individual education as a foundation for all other socioeconomic development runs strongly through other sectors, and education advocates will find much support for retaining education in the post-2015 goals outside the education sector.
The post-2015 global education goals are likely to be stated in comprehensive, aspirational terms. The evidence for selective primary education interventions remains sufficiently ambiguous that defenders of the comprehensive approach can continue to argue that the electives have failed to prove their case. Beyond the health sector, Child survival, not Health for All, was the catalyst for a global initiative in education. However, primary school student survival does not make most education advocates' hearts beat faster and the number of international agreements committing countries to provide a more comprehensive approach to education has only increased.
International organizations and the innovations they champion have played a major role in developing and promoting global development goals. Health has seemingly advanced towards its goals more quickly than education. Is there something education could learn from health? Chabbott provides parallel case studies of two innovations - one in health and another in education - closely tied to the advancement of global goals and their close association with two organizations:Â the Cholera Lab and BRAC, both originating in Bangladesh and now international. Chabbott's analysis follows these innovations from invention to international scaling up.
Health for All and Education for All have been rallying cries for a host of international development activities for more than a quarter century. Where did these global goals come from? Why have the health goals seemingly advanced so much faster than those in education? In this book, author Colette Chabbott explores the foundational role that international development organizations and the innovations they champion have played in shaping and advancing such goals. Chabbott demonstrates the importance of science and measurement in rendering some innovations more universal and compelling than others. Her analysis includes in-depth case studies of innovations developed at the grassroots and scaled up at the national and international levels by the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research and by BRAC, once a Bangladeshi now a major international NGO. All these studies suggest that greater investment in new types of education research, based in the Third World, but with strong ties to research centers of international scope in the First World, are likely the prerequisites for achieving better, cheaper, faster universal education. This important book will provoke scholars, students, and international development practitioners to think more deeply about the cultural and scientific underpinnings of education and international development. The author's careful analyses are particularly needed as the international community defines new global goals for the post-2015 era.
The writer works for BRAC Education Program. He taught in Sylhet, Comilla and Mirzapur Cadet Colleges, RajukUttara Model College and Bangladesh Open University. Email: masumbillah65@gmail.com
Institutionalising health and education for all
Masum Billah | Published: October 31, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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