For international aid and development agencies working in the social sectors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) shape their flagship programs and budgets, notably in education and health. Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2000, the goals constitute an ambitious, dynamic, and integrated strategy for poverty reduction by the year 2015. Major global organizations, not least the World Bank and other specialized UN agencies, now routinely frame their policies and interventions in terms of the MDGs, an approach also highly visible in the aid programs provided by major Western donor countries, and, perhaps more predictably, by prominent non-governmental organizations committed to poverty reduction.

For education, much work has been done to quantify progress over the 2000-2008 period and to assess prospects for the years leading to 2015. But at this midpoint, it is timely to reconsider the ongoing policy priorities implied in the MDGs themselves. At their heart is the notion of education for all (EFA). The language surrounding EFA is the language of idealism, not simply because the MDG education targets are ambitious but because the impossibility of reaching the MDG education targets right across the developing world is now a certainty. The 2005 deadline for gender equity in education has come and gone, and in 2015 as many as 70 countries will still be short of providing a basic education to each of its young people, some seriously so.

Idealism in Educational History

The history of education is deeply embedded in attempts to achieve an ideal society through educational provision. Utopian visions are numerous; even more numerous are attempts at social reform by promoting widespread religious commitment. Political revolutions also frequently saw in education a pathway to their sustainability, and we are well used to attempts to achieve social cohesiveness, equity, and stability by educational means. Given its potentially transcendent nature, it is understandable that education is so often clothed in the talk of idealists. More than this, universal education has become an ideal in itself, and not merely a means to idealized ends.

In the West, the rise of mass schooling that followed the Industrial Revolution saw a tempering of much historical idealism. As soon as the idea of mass education took hold, idealism had to yield some ground to more realistic concerns of ways and means—not least how many young people society could place in school, as well as what form and duration their schooling should take. Whether or not it was government that was looked to as the guarantor of universal access to education, it was clear from the very beginnings of mass expansion that the rate of growth would be tempered by resource and capacity constraints. Such concerns impinged directly on the very purposes of mass schooling, these now being subjected to the discipline of economic scrutiny. So there opened up that great divide in modern education—tension between the moral and material.

We know from recent history that material concerns seem to count most in the construction of educational priorities and budgets. Economic rationales for education have shaped enrollment patterns, the content of curriculum, and the very way the purposes of education are understood. This has proven to be universally the case—in the developed world, in the transition economies of the old Soviet bloc, and across the developing world of the South. Yet the idealism of education as a potentially transcendent enterprise refuses to go away, and individual learners, their families, and their communities seem unshakeable in belief that education can be an endeavour that transcends the confines of material existence. One prominent expression of this belief is the idea of education as a fundamental human right, famously included in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The chief obstacle to putting the ideal into effect is less a matter of moral acceptance than the obstacle of capacity.

The MDGs and Education

There are two Millennium Development Goals that set educational targets: achieving universal primary education by 2015 and achieving gender equality in education by 2005.

Fundamental to understanding the MDG objectives of poverty eradication is that formal primary schooling is regarded as the education strategy with greatest potential. It is instructive to see that the MDGs pointedly exclude most remaining dimensions of basic education that have gained policy acceptance in recent decades: extending early childhood education, providing basic education and skills for unschooled adults and youth, extending universal schooling to the lower secondary level, and achieving gender equality and urban-rural equality in education. As a set, these objectives provide a basis for a fully literate society capable of tackling poverty on a broad front. It is a much more comprehensive approach to education than that which we find within the MDGs. Understood in this way, the MDGs constitute a deliberately selective approach to education, overtly bypassing a range of strategies fundamental to producing fully literate societies.

There has been no society—regardless of affluence or stage of modernization—that has come close to universal literacy by relying on the primary school alone. Those that have come closest to full literacy have seen their primary schools complemented by a range of other educational opportunities, whether formal, non-formal, or informal. In the West, perhaps it was the rapid expansion of secondary education that chiefly performed this function. Some societies, Western or otherwise, have taken seriously the role of integrated literacy and skills development in such settings as the workplace. Others have looked to a range of community contexts (religious organizations, health clinics, and cultural and political associations) as settings that provide rationales for literacy and skills development among adults and out-of-school youth. The overall lesson of history is that it is naпve to look to the primary school on its own to achieve a fully literate society. The painful evidence for this is highlighted by the persistence in the world’s most affluent countries of the adult illiteracy phenomenon, whereby up to a quarter of adults, irrespective of language spoken, have serious functional difficulties in literacy and numeracy.

The Limits of Previous Commitments

The education MDGs were foreshadowed a decade earlier by an “expanded vision of basic education” as adopted at the World Conference on Education for All, held in Jomtien, Thailand in March 1990. That occasion saw an almighty tussle among its key UN sponsors, especially the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF. In one corner was the World Bank, committed stridently and inflexibly to the primary schooling approach, while the others were keen to promote the expanded vision. Although the Jomtien Declaration was seen as an important milestone at the time, the tragedy was that subsequent years saw business-as-usual on the “development and education” front. The lead UN agencies insisted on their centrality to the process, and in this sense Jomtien was perhaps the last of the Cold War era international conferences. Every 10 to 15 years the UN system organizes an attempt to set ambitious targets for universal schooling and military-like assaults on world illiteracy. We have become as used to their inevitable failure as to their lofty aspirations and targets.