Revisiting equal education for all

This article is about the current role and weaknesses of Equal Education for All (EFA), as there are missing objectives that have a deep impact on the ability to achieve quality education in South Asia. "Despite significant progress over the last few decades, 61 million children remain out of schools, around half of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Quality of education in schools is often abysmal. In response, governments and donors, as part of their commitment to achieve Education for All by 2015 pledged that the priority is not only to get children into schools but also provide them with quality education and respond to their learning needs" (2013). The UNESCO report on the quality education for all- "Evidence Matters" 2013 projects the overall impact of EFA intervention in developing country.
It has been more than half a century the notion of Education for All has formed certain objectives, "the recognition of education as a universal human right" and aspirational horizon for national policy makers. The EFA first emerged since the time of the formation of UNESCO, as a new paradigm in global governance in education.
Education for All has got significance in the central organising theme for World Conferences in Jomtien (1990) and in Senegal (2000). It supported to frame global social ideas; specifically, they have taken action linking between learning systems and social justice. However, almost seventy years later, global institutions, national policy makers, educators, researchers, civil society organisations and citizens struggle and compete to give a concrete, tangible meaning to EFA.
The major concern is the current goals of EFA ignore learners' strategic needs, and its highly prescriptive learning goals currently only meet basic needs. UNESCO notes that regardless of recording relative improvement in education indicators over time, progress towards EFA goals in the three most populated South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) remains slow (2008).
It is time to ask if we need to define education as an individual exploration (addressing basic needs, consisting only of knowledge and human skills or values) or a cooperative one (including social change in addition to self-development) to foster a more holistic version of universal education, in contrast to the current focus on skill acquisition and career building.
It is also time to examine the adequacy and potential of EFA in case of religious education and move beyond the historical focus on enrolment in basic schooling only, as quality and equality issues also have a deep impact in all spheres of learners' social lives. I believe that EFA goals are useful and should be pursued in South Asia. Though their impact remains low, there is still an opportunity to improve the religious stream in terms of quality, equality, inclusion (of subjects/ideas/objectives), innovation (in the curriculum and teacher education) and a moderation of the regulations regarding girls' dress.                                               
 Bano (2011) presents a comparative analysis of the state-led programmes to modernise madrasa (religious) education in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan which have aimed to introduce secular subjects into the madrasa curriculum, and shows that madrasas can be important partners for meeting Education for All targets. Yet madrasa reform has been accepted and implemented to varying degrees. It remains riddled with challenges and promises, and, at best, uncertain outcomes.
It is necessary to identify the specific challenges facing EFA in South Asia. What are the barriers to its reform in order to provide both access and quality? There is a need to use a comparative lens to examine the madrasa reform processes and the secondary systems run by secular and religious institutions in South Asian countries. The queries are:  what the challenges are in achieving quality and equality in the education sector in South Asia today, what specific challenges facing madrasa education, what obstacles are there to its reform and modernisation, whether there is a role for religious education in the comprehensive education reform required in the region.
Policy makers and researchers must explore on the school enrolment, the structure of the school systems, curriculum and the organisation of teacher training in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Researchers can discuss the historical, political, ideological and religious factors that shape and sustain these systems. Employing a political economic analysis, researchers can learn what can be done to learn the impact of economic processes with regard to distribution of power and wealth, and the long-lasting effects on the structure and content of the education systems in the region.
The main criticism of EFA is that it has failed to provide quality education and is unable to address issues of inequality in terms of access to higher levels of education. We must identify the differences between literacy and quality education and determine the top priority. To provide meaning, in addition to technical education, it is also necessary to teach life skills, virtues and values.  
There is a need for a curriculum focusing on self-development with equal emphasis on skill acquisition and career building. However, I also emphasize that educational objectives should be collective rather than individual explorations of basic needs such as literacy through the expansion of enrolment, lowest learning level of the universal systems, based on human capital theory. In the end, the shortcomings of EFA need to be understood if effective changes are to be made. Whole system of thinking is largely absent in the EFA paradigm. This is the time to move toward holism, whole thinking and sustainability as the basis for a paradigm for higher-level learning for social change.
Education should not ever be something that is measured only by statistics which do not reflect the actual individual achievements of students outside the testing norms. The education degrees or higher education do not necessarily develop high-quality teachers, however a teacher must be qualified by minimum standards. Teacher's qualification should not be measured by education degree and teacher's performance in the classroom alone. Quality in education can be enhanced with the teacher's self development, experience and earned knowledge; however, curriculum must be reflexive, so learning objectives can be practiced and exercised well to bring happiness into children's lives and make the schooling experience a profoundly positive and encouraging to all children.
The 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals is only a few months away, so there are obvious time constraints to adopt any new plan to immediately improve quality. However, for the next long-term plan, EFA goals should be more focused on quality education instead of their current exclusive concern with the enrolment of disadvantaged children. This must be made a priority in South Asia, despite the significant economic limitations and politico-ideological conflicts that inevitably constrain such a process.
Ultimately, I argue for dramatically improved EFA reform that does not neglect the religious stream in South Asian education systems. Partnering with the religious stream, EFA can advance initiatives to reach a large number of disadvantaged children in South Asia, ensuring access, providing for their learning needs and improving quality education.  
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