Learning for All : Investing in People's Knowledge and Skills to Promote Development
Education is fundamental to development and growth. Access to education, which is a basic human right enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights and the United Nations Convention on the rights of the child, is also a strategic developme...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2017
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/169531468331015171/Learning-for-all-investing-in-peoples-knowledge-and-skills-to-promote-development-World-Bank-Group-education-strategy-2020 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27790 |
| Summary: | Education is fundamental to development
and growth. Access to education, which is a basic human
right enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights
and the United Nations Convention on the rights of the
child, is also a strategic development investment. The human
mind makes possible all other development achievements, from
health advances and agricultural innovation to
infrastructure construction and private sector growth. For
developing countries to reap these benefits fully both by
learning from the stock of global ideas and through
innovation they need to unleash the potential of the human
mind. And there is no better tool for doing so than
education. The new strategy focuses on learning for a simple
reason: growth, development, and poverty reduction depend on
the knowledge and skills that people acquire, not the number
of years that they sit in a classroom. At the individual
level, while a diploma may open doors to employment, it is a
worker's skills that determine his or her productivity
and ability to adapt to new technologies and opportunities.
Knowledge and skills also contribute to an individual's
ability to have a healthy and educated family and engage in
civic life. At the societal level, recent research shows
that the level of skills in a workforce as measured by
performance on international student assessments such as the
Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study
(TIMSS) predicts economic growth rates far better than do
average schooling levels. For example, an increase of one
standard deviation in student reading and math scores
(roughly equivalent to improving a country's
performance ranking from the median to the top 15 percent)
is associated with a very large increase of 2 percentage
points in annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita
growth. To achieve learning for all, the World Bank Group
will channel its efforts in education in two strategic
directions: reforming education systems at the country level
and building a high-quality knowledge base for education
reforms at the global level. |
|---|