EDUCATING TEENAGERS
	The growth in secondary education in recent years is unprecedented. The result is overcrowded classrooms filled with teenagers from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Focus, a four-page report, looks at the problems of overburdened teachers and bored students.

Edito - Is Education for All (EFA) the business of the whole world, or merely a concern for developing countries? This question is posed in UNESCO’s recent landmark publication Education for All: Is the World on Track?, EFA Global Monitoring Report 2002. Making universal primary education a Millennium Development Goal may have given the impression that EFA is only for poor countries. It is not. All countries should strive for EFA because none are fully satisfied with the education that their residents receive.

One EFA goal is to ensure that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and lifeskills programmes. Many take this goal as shorthand for secondary education, which most countries find problematic. Some of the issues are explored in this number of Education Today. Developing countries want to expand secondary education so that it equips youngsters to contribute to the society and the economy in which they live. Industrialized countries already provide universal secondary education but now find that these schools are lightning rods for contemporary storms in society.

Most of us would like youngsters to emerge from secondary education as autonomous and motivated people who aspire to contribute to their communities by making a satisfactory living for themselves and furthering the common good. How can we achieve this?Richer interaction between teachers and pupils is one approach. Cuba has recast the first three years of secondary school so that youngsters have the same teacher for all subjects except physical education and modern languages. The aim is to create closer relationships and a broader view of knowledge.

Another approach stresses personal values. Scotland’s Columba 1400 Centre www.columba1400.com has shown that even short courses, if centred on the principles of awareness, focus, creativity, integrity, perseverance and service, can change the attitudes and subsequent life choices of demotivated youth.

Another principle is to associate the wider community with the challenge. If the crisis at secondary level expresses tensions in the wider society, then the community must help to address them through the joint efforts of parents, employers, politicians and pundits. Civil society must reproduce itself.

John Daniel
Assistant Director-General for Education