by Val Diggle

Created on: November 21, 2009   Last Updated: November 22, 2009

Assessing how much a culture values education is fraught with difficulty - even within an educational system that appears to operate inside a single culture, the values placed upon that system by a middle-class elite might be very different to those who belong to the working-class.

The world's poorest children live in East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is amongst the countries that fall within these zones that education would appear, on the surface, to be least valued, if we apply Western standards for assessing that value.

Only half of the children who live in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are estimated to enroll in school, which makes the Millennium Development goal of free, quality education for all children by 2015, look unlikely here. Of those that do enroll in school in the poorest regions on earth, there is a huge gap between enrollments from the richest and poorest sectors of society. According to statistics from the International Monetary Fund, in Pakistan about 86% of the richest children enroll into primary school compared with only about 36% of the poorest, making a 50% gap. While in Morocco, the rich-poor percentage gap is even wider. Of all the enrollment figures across the poorest regions, girls fare the worst, after children with disabilities, and many children drop out before they complete their primary education.

But if we stop to consider the factors that might have an influence on these statistics, it appears that education may not be undervalued in the poorest countries, but simply come third on the list, out of pragmatic necessity, after food and shelter. Families who are preoccupied with keeping body and soul together are least able to see the longer-term advantages that education might provide their children and, ultimately, society as a whole.

Another indicator of the value that is placed on education by a culture might be to look at the amount that a government invests in education, out of the revenue from taxation. Once again, here the poorest countries fare the worst. Poor countries are the least able to raise funds for educational purposes out of taxes, and their governments most likely to be inefficient or corrupt when handling this revenue. Larger projects, like road-building can conceal financial 'kick-backs' more than the money that might support the on-going costs of resourcing schools with text-books and providing training and salaries for teachers. Insecure governments that operate as

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