Settle the social debt owed to people.

• Author: Achecar, Pamela Martinez
• Position: ESSAYS BY OUR FACEBOOK FANS - Essay

millions of children around the world face the uncertainty of accessing quality education and consequently are left without a choice in what they wish to do with their lives. The goal of making education universal provides a way for governments to begin to settle the social debt owed to populations worldwide.

Education is a human right, which is why world leaders have committed to guarantee primary education for all as a first step towards making education universal at all levels. This goal, along with seven others, make up the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed to by 189 nations in September 2000. The objective is to drastically reduce extreme poverty, while promoting gender equality, health, and environmental sustain-ability, by 2015.

In 2000, it was estimated that approximately 103 million school-age children were not attending classes, nor did they have the possibility of doing so. Since then, significant progress has been made. By 2007, the number was cut to an estimated 72 million. According to projections by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) there might still be 56 million illiterate children in 2015.

Enrolling and consequently remaining in school are often conditioned by gender, family income, residence, language, ethnicity, and disability. However, since universal education implies guaranteeing the right to all children--including indigenous populations, ethnic and linguistic minorities, and children in conflict zones--governments have a responsibility to provide alternative means of education in response to specific circumstances.

The main obstacles to this objective are the lack of economic resources and the added burden from the current financial crisis. Progress towards universal education will not be under way, simply because education budgets are not being designed to meet the needs. Moreover, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that approximately 18 million teachers would be needed in order to impart quality education to of the world's children by 2015.

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Gender inequality is also an obstacle. The latest UNESCO report Education For All states that girls were still less likely to be schooled than boys.

One does not have to be an expert to infer that the four years until the 2015 deadline is not enough to transform and expand the world's education systems, satisfy the demand for teachers, or multiply the resources assigned to education...