Quality education imperatives for inclusive basic education: moving beyond the rhetoric

Abstract

Although quality education is central to both international and national education debates and practices in most countries, there exist reluctance and a snails-pace move towards rolling-out quality education in basic education for all. Needless to say, there exist disparities in the policies, equity and provisioning strategies of basic education for all learners. Most South American and South Pacific countries are battling to realize the Millennium Goals regarding this matter. Some African countries are neither doing well nor satisfactorily progressing in this regard too. Those that are better off have not begun to monitor and evaluate the quality of their basic education except ensuring that teachers do teach and learners do attend classes. The only quality control and measurement is through the mid-year and end of year examinations. This paper looks at quality in basic education for all as composed not only of the controls (assurance standards used) that are supposedly embedded within an institution of learning, but also perceives quality education as an imperative dimension of the teaching and learning processes, steeped in the knowledges (if I may) that are produced through basic education programmes, which entail amongst others – education for sustainability and indigenous knowledge systems, as knowledge types that enables learners to be worthy citizen. Hence, the argument that quality basic education for all should move beyond the rhetoric of unjust, ill-informed educational policies and the legitimization of hegemonic knowledge-types, but should engage open-ended and pluralist-enquiry alternatives through critical, exploratory and reflexive approaches within quality basic education practice.

Keywords: Basic education; quality education; education for sustainability; indigenous knowledge systems, inclusive education