Education
教育
Reaching the poorest
给予赤贫者受教育的机会
Enrolling the world’s poorest children in school needs new thinking, not just more money from taxpayers
要让世界上最贫困的儿童能接受教育，光靠纳税人缴纳更多的税金是不够的，还要在思维上有所创新。
Jan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition
DAWN has just broken but classes have already started at the village school in Aqualaar, in the Garissa district of Kenya’s arid north-east. Around 30 children, mostly from families of Somali herders, sit listening as an enthusiastic 18-year-old teacher, Ibrahim Hussein, gives an arithmetic lesson. The school is really little more than a sandy patch of ground under an acacia tree. Mr Hussein’s blackboard hangs from its branches. There are no desks or chairs. Pupils follow the lesson by using sticks to scratch numbers in the sand.
尽管天刚破晓，阿奎拉乡村学校就已经开始授课了（阿奎拉位于肯尼亚东北部气候干燥的加里萨区）。听课的孩子有30个左右，大多是索马里牧人的儿女。孩子们坐着聆听着他们18岁的老师易卜拉欣•侯赛因热情洋溢地上算术课。说是学校，其实不过是金合欢树下的一块沙地。侯赛因老师的黑板就挂在树上。那里既没有桌子也没有椅子，小学生们用木棍在沙地上演算，以此跟上进度。
The lack of basic kit is only too typical of schools in poor countries. What is unusual, sadly, is that Mr Hussein was actually present and teaching when his school was visited by Kevin Watkins, the lead author of “Reaching the Marginalised”, a new report on education in the developing world by UNESCO.
缺乏基本的授课设施，是贫困国家学校的一大特点。非同寻常的是，当凯文•沃特金斯（凯文•沃特金斯是联合国教科文组织关于发展中国家教育的新报告《伸手帮助被边缘化的群体》的首席作者。）来参观学校的时候，侯赛因老师居然在学校授课。老师在授课成了非同寻常的事，多少让人心酸。
In India, for example, research by the World Bank reveals that 25% of teachers in government-run schools are away on any given day; of those present, only half were actually teaching when the bank’s researchers made spot checks. That is dreadful but not unusual: teacher absenteeism rates are around 20% in rural Kenya, 27% in Uganda and 14% in Ecuador.
比如说，世界银行研究显示在印度，政府经营的学校中，随便哪一天就有25%的老师缺勤；剩下的老师中有一半只有在世行的研究人员来抽查是才会授课。此情此景令人震惊，却又再平常不过：老师缺勤率在肯尼亚农村是20%左右，在乌干达是27%，在厄瓜多尔是14%。
Despite the inspiring rhetoric that accompanied the adoption of the UN’s “Education For All” goals in 1999, progress has been patchy. The numbers of unenrolled school-age children dropped by 33m in 2007 compared with 1999. About 15m of that fall came in India alone (though UNESCO says statistics may understate the problem by up to 30%). In countries like Liberia and Nigeria the numbers have hardly budged since 1999. Of the 72m still outside school, 45% are in sub-Saharan Africa.
联合国1999年制订了“全民教育”的目标，豪言壮语振奋人心，但取得的成果却参差不齐。2007年适龄儿童失学人数比1999年下降了3300万，其中约有1500万儿童在印度（但是联合国教科文组织称这个数据可能低估了问题的严重性，有30%的偏差）。1999年以来，在利比里亚和尼日利亚这样的国家里，失学儿童的数量几乎纹丝不动。在世界上剩下的7200万失学儿童中，撒哈拉沙漠以南的非洲就占了45%。
Dig, and it grows still gloomier. Two-thirds of the fall in out-of-school numbers was in 2002-04. Since then, improvement has been scanty, though getting the final chunk of children into school is necessarily the trickiest task as the easy cases are already solved. The hardest job is enrolling children from remote areas, who speak minority languages; or come from cultures that place little value on schooling or (in India) from castes that have been long excluded from it. In more than a third of the 63 countries for which such data were available, more than 30% of young adults have fewer than four years of schooling. Nineteen of these countries are in Africa; the remaining three are Guatemala, Pakistan and Nicaragua.
尽管辛勤耕耘，收成却越来越惨淡。减少的失学人数有三分之二是2002-2004年间实现的。自此以后，只有零星的进展。不过，解决了简单的问题以后，让最后这一批孩子接受教育理所当然是最艰难的任务。其中最艰难的任务是让居住在偏远地区的孩子以及说少数民族语言的孩子上学；让生活在轻视教育的文化中的孩子或是（在印度）处于被剥夺受教育权利的种姓中的孩子上学。能提供这些数据的的有63个国家，在其中三分之一以上的国家里有30%多的年轻人接受的教育不足四年。其中有19个国家在非洲，剩下的三个是危地马拉、巴基斯坦和尼加拉瓜。
The UNESCO report shows stark differences within the 80-plus countries it covers. In Nigeria about 10% of young Yoruba-speaking adults have under four years of schooling; for Hausa-speakers the figure is over 60%. Focusing on ethnicity or regional disparities can be controversial. The governments of Turkey and India are unhappy about the report’s mentions of, respectively, Kurdish girls and low-caste children.
联合国教科文组织的报告显示，在其涵盖的80多个国家里，各种区别显而易见。在尼日利亚，说约鲁巴语的成年人中只有大约10%受教育少于四年；而说豪撒语的成年人中有60%以上接受的教育少于四年。集中精力解决民族或地域差距可能会引发争议。土耳其和印度政府就分别对报告中提到库尔德女孩和低种姓的孩子表示不满。
Attending school is only the first step towards education. Even spending time in school does not guarantee good outcomes. In Ghana, for example, sixth-graders sitting a simple multiple-choice reading test scored on average the same mark that would be gained by random guessing.
上学只是通向教育的第一步，而且并非去上学就一定会有好的结果。比如在加纳，6年级学生做简单阅读题的得分和瞎猜的结果差不多。
So what to do? More government spending—as suggested by the report—is unlikely to be a complete answer. Others, such as James Tooley, a British academic who advises a chain of low-cost for-profit schools in India, say private-sector education in poor countries routinely outperforms the free, taxpayer-subsidised version. Teachers turn up; parents complain if standards slip or pupils flounder.
那么如何是好呢？报告建议增加政府的教育开销，但光增加投入不可能解决问题。同时还有一些不同声音，比如詹姆斯•托雷。詹姆斯是个学者，他为印度的一个低成本营利性的教育连锁学校作顾问。他认为在贫困国家私立学校一般都比免费的公立学校效果好。私立学校的老师出勤，而且如果教育水平下降，或者学生逃课，家长就会投诉。
Another answer may be performance-related pay for teachers. Two researchers, Karthik Muralidharan of the University of California at San Diego and Venkatesh Sundararaman of the World Bank, tested that idea in 300 state-run schools in Andhra Pradesh in India. The extra pay was three times more effective in boosting student test scores than spending the same money on teaching materials. When schools are poorly run, studying what is wrong is the most vital subject of all.
另外一个解决办法可能是给发老师绩效工资。来自加州大学圣迭戈分校的卡迪克•穆拉里达兰和世界银行的万可太实•桑德拉拉曼，在印度安德拉邦的300所国立学校中试验了这个想法。要提高学生的测试成绩，给老师多发工资比把同样的钱投入到教学设施中有效三倍。学校运营不善之际，研究问题所在才是当务之急。
译者：热血地瓜
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