WCEFA: A Moment in the History of Multilateral Education

Abstract

For over six decades, multilateral agencies in education have prompted the international community to embrace proposals for large-scale initiatives to solve once and for all the problems of illiteracy and the lack of universal schooling. Even with their highly contrastive policy frameworks, the major agencies can periodically be relied upon to call for military-like assaults to achieve basic education for all, usually over a 10–15-year time frame. Just as predictable have been inflated expectations, failures of analysis, strategy and financing, and the tendency of agencies to hold other actors to account for failing to meet agency expectations. The much-trumpeted World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA, 1990) is analyzed in the wider perspective of post-WW2 agency programs for universal literacy and primary education. Although expectations of success were high at the time, the WCEFA initiative quickly evaporated, although it remained for some time as a much-cited normative and political point of reference. The failure of WCEFA is analyzed in terms of the strains and stresses facing multilateral education at the end of the Cold War and in terms of more recent multilateral commitments to education for all.

Citation

Jones, P.W. (2007), "WCEFA: A Moment in the History of Multilateral Education", Baker, D.P. and Wiseman, A.W. (Ed.) Education for All (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 8), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 521-538. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1479-3679(06)08018-2