Children in some countries stay in school into their teens and in others leave early, and not all who sit in a classroom learn what the school is meant to teach. What is owed to every child, and whose business is it to see that it is given?
The picture
What the numbers show, read from the Data library each time the page opens.
How to read the chart above, and the words it uses (for secondary school).
How to read the data
The figure is everyone enrolled in secondary school, of any age, compared with the number of children of secondary-school age. It can pass a full hundred where older students or repeaters are enrolled, and it shows who is in a school, not what they learn there.
Key terms
Gross enrolment
All students enrolled at a level, of any age, as a share of the children of the official age for that level.
Secondary school
The stage after primary school, usually the teenage years.
Repeater
A student who stays in the same grade for another year.
Who has a stake
Each interest, then readings from the Catholic library and the Classics library that bear on it, oldest first. Choose a group to read.
To be taught to read, think and work, whatever their family’s means, and to have the time of childhood and not only of labour.
To bring up their children in their own faith and values, to choose or influence their schooling, and not to have the school take their place.
To teach well, with the respect, means and freedom the work needs, and to be trusted by the families who give them their children.
Citizens who can read, work and take part in common life, schools that are paid for fairly, and a say in what is taught that does not become control of the mind.
For discussion
If every child has a right to be taught, how should parents’ first responsibility and the community’s interest in educated citizens be weighed when they disagree about what and how?
Poor children have the least time and the most to gain from school. What should the public owe them, and what should families still be left to decide?
What do teachers need, from parents and from the public, to teach as stand-ins for the families that trust them?
