By David Napier

It has been said that to know your future, you must know your past. Few adhere to this adage with the same rigor as Sir John Daniel, head of the Vancouver-based Commonwealth of Learning and the second speaker in CCEPA's Trust in Education Series.

In a speech titled "Success and Failure in the Global Campaign for Education for All: What Now?", the British knight who has called Canada home for many years, took his audience on what one listener (referencing a Marshall McLuhan turn of phrase) called a "wild trip through the Gutenberg Galaxy".

Certainly, Daniel covered decade's worth of ground, infusing his comments with a rich knowledge gathered during many years toiling in the field of education. Highlights from his curriculum vitae include: a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford; senior academic officer at the Télé-université, Université du Québec, President of Laurentian University (and Full Professor, Engineering & Science), Vice-Chancellor of The Open University (U.K.), and UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Education (2001-04).

Daniel, whose passion is for distance learning and education for all, started his CCEPA speech by looking at why education is important for all and then took listeners on a centuries-long journey that went from Adam Smith to the UN Declaration of Human Rights to Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and his concept that development is "a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy".

"Freedom is the measure of development, and free people are the drivers of development," explained Daniel. "Considering development as freedom makes education a component of development as well as a means for promoting it. Education fosters some freedoms directly and, since freedoms strengthen each other, it has a knock-on effect that promotes development generally."

With this context in place, Daniel proceeded to tackle the lengthy and at times ineffective "Campaign to Achieve Education for All". The Campaign took formal shape in 1990 when lofty targets were set at the "World Conference on Education for All" in Jomtien, Thailand. These targets included: the expansion of early childhood care; universal completion of primary education; improvement in learning achievement; reduction of adult literacy; expansion training in essential skills for youth and adults; and general education for sustainable development.

Unfortunately, as Daniel admitted, most of these targets have not been met. And in many ways the world has, in fact, slid backwards from these goals as evidenced by the fact that in 1990 there were 100 million children ages 6-11 not in school and by 2000 this number had grown to 125 million.

After Jomtien a number of other forums were convened and goals set (some streamlined and simplified, although none less ambitious than the first), including the shaping of the World Bank's "Fast-Track Initiative" (FTI), which championed "Universal Public Education" (UPE, aka, "Education For All"). However, even these well-intentioned, well-funded efforts at Universal Public Education have met with mixed reviews and questionable results.

In terms of success, "substantial progress has been made in getting children into primary school," says Daniel. "The obverse of the coin - the failure - was that in 2006, 75 million children, 55% of them girls, were still not in primary school. Furthermore, on present trends, there will still be some 29 million children out of school by 2015 - a number almost equivalent to the population of Canada," he added.

So where does that leave us? Not surprisingly for an organization that promotes Open Schooling and Teacher Education, the Commonwealth of Learning is committed to bringing schooling to the world's youngsters as well as adults.

"What the developing world needs is open schooling at scale," says Daniel. "We consider that coping with the secondary surge (enrolment at the secondary level) will be the world's biggest educational challenge in the next decades." But, he added, "It cannot be solved by conventional means." Distance and open learning is one key piece of the puzzle. Simply getting more and better teachers in the classrooms is another.

As the second lecture in the Trust in Educations series drew to a close it was appropriate that one could not distinguish between Sir John Daniel's eloquent reminder that "education for all" is as critical to the success of the individual as it is the world, and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights that states simply, "Everyone has the right to education".

Similarly, attendees could not help but feel that the "Global Campaign for Education for All" gets only a mediocre grade.

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Author David Napier is a Story-based Consultant providing communications advice and support to organizations and individuals. His company is based in Halifax.