Awareness
Education is a fundamental human right that is inextricable from a happy and peaceful society, and on January 24th we recognize and celebrate it through the International Day of Education. We take this day to bring attention to both the crucial role that education plays in our past, present, and future, as well as the fact that many around the world are deprived of full and free access to such an important experience.
The establishment of an International Day of Education was declared at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on December 3rd, 2018, and the first day was recognized on January 24th the next year. Ever since, countries and organizations around the world—like UNESCO and Together For Girls—have commemorated the 24th in a variety of ways, such as the presentations and talks that the UN organizes. Each year has a designated ‘theme,’ ranging from 2021’s “Reclaiming and Revitalising Education for the COVID-19 Generation” to this year’s; “AI and education: Preserving human agency in a world of automation.”
Today, thanks to technology and organizations such as Wikipedia, we can enjoy wider access to information than ever before, and yet the disparity and inequalities in education have, arguably, grown. These obstacles to the human right that is education can display in a multitude of ways, and sprout from a variety of soils. Broadly, the United Nations estimates that 244 million children and adolescents around the world are not attending school, and 617 million cannot read or do basic math. This is a truly horrific set of numbers, especially considering the indispensable role of education in breaking the cycle of poverty, closing the gender gap, and improving quality of life all around.
Perhaps the largest of these barriers to access is due to gender-based discrimination. Assigned-female at birth folks across the world have been or actively are denied a full education for no reason other than their perceived gender. Even when permitted to attend school, girls and other gender-discriminated kids and youth might also face social pressure to drop out after a certain point, a lack of opportunity to attend higher education, (be it high school or post-secondary) or even restrictions in the things they’re ‘allowed’ to learn. Even here in Canada, where we have relatively broad access to education, girls and other gender-discriminated kids can and do still face discrimination from teachers and administrators in school. One of the major academic inequalities that all kids might face in Canada is the fact that access to comprehensive and factual sexual education varies dramatically based on where a kid goes to school. Not all provinces even require sex ed at all, let alone demand that the education provided be inclusive, accurate, and thorough. While this affects kids of all genders, the amount of misinformation around about female and intersex bodies in particular means that the lack of an unbiased, truthful source of information can lead to dangerous misconceptions.
While gender-based educational discrimination is a massive and global issue, inequalities in education can develop from a plethora of different areas. Educational discrimination based on race and/or class is another enormous challenge, especially considering the intersections that often occur between Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) folks and poverty. It’s a long-known pattern that schools in poorer areas (which statistically have a higher population of BIPOC individuals) tend to get fewer resources than those in wealthier neighbourhoods. This is, thankfully, something that has gotten more attention in recent years thanks to media such as Abbot Elementary, which focuses on an inner-city school and the teachers who work incredibly hard to make up for the fact that they are already starting on the back foot simply by where their school is. While this is extremely visible in America, we up north are by no means exempt from this pattern. First Nations youth in particular face massive inequality in education due to a web of interconnected reasons, which has led to a statistical chasm between First Nations students and a large portion of the country when it comes to cornerstones like graduation or a completed post-secondary education.
One other area of educational discrimination that we may not often think about, and one that affects a massive number of people globally and here in Canada, is the barriers to accessing post-secondary education. Perhaps the largest of these barriers is the enormous and oft-prohibitive cost required to gain a degree, certification, or any other higher education, which alone forces countless people to either take out debilitating loans or forego post-secondary education altogether. In a world and economy where the weight and importance of a degree seem to be only growing, it’s not hard to see how this barrier contributes to generational cycles of poverty. Of course, race, gender, disability, and any number of marginalizations beyond that also stand as obstacles to a post-secondary education that’s becoming increasingly necessary to many across the globe.
We may be in a golden age of information, but the reality is that not all of us have equal access to said golden age. It’s telling that this article has only barely scratched the surface of all the ways and reasons people’s access to education is restricted or made outright impossible—and one must remember that equal education is a truly intersectional issue. We here in Canada—although we are by no means a perfect example of a flawless educational system—do have far more privilege than so many around the world, and thus we must do what we can to ensure that one day, education is treated as the fundamental human right that it is for everyone.
