Aims of education 18% of this year’s budget is dedicated to education. This is not at all excessive, as education is to be seen as the key to a prosperous future, from which ever angle we view the question. We may look at it first from the individual’s point of view. Education is a basic human right. In the modern world an illiterate person is a powerless person and inevitably becomes a victim, whether of injustice, exploitation, or simply poverty. The first aim of education is therefore to empower the individual, to enable him to look after himself, to earn a decent wage and have an acceptable standard of living. This implies a basic training in what ever skills are appropriate to the society in which he lives.

Then education has the duty to encourage the personal aptitudes of each pupil to the full, thus bringing about a healthy development of the personality. In a successful educational system no-one should feel “useless” to society or to himself. “Special needs” schools and centers should provide for pupils with learning difficulties or disabilities so that they too may find their place in society.

Education should develop in the pupil a taste for knowledge. Reading is thus the key to everything-it opens up endless perspectives: the worlds of literature, past and present, of exploration and discovery, of art and science-the list is almost literally endless.

Looking at the question now from another view-point, that of the state or of society as a whole, education appears no less essential an element of life. It begins the socialization process in the young child. She learns to share, to deal with other people, to function as a member of a community. Without this process, society as we know it would hardly exist.

All countries need an appropriately-trained labour force-without this no real development can take place nowadays. Also, in the modern world, people need to be prepared to accept change, as the ‘life-time job’ seems to be getting rarer. Education should prepare them to be willing to adapt, to re-train so as to be able to take on board new knowledge and new technologies.

Having an educated population facilitates many things, for example, the combat against HIV – Aids and other diseases. Educated people are more likely to accept arguments based on reason, and to reject superstition. A recent and very sad example was the mass rejection of the polio vaccine in northern Nigeria, which has rapidly led to an increase in cases of polio among young children.

Lastly, we can safely say that democracy cannot truly function unless the population is educated. People with enquiring minds, aware of their rights and ready to defend them are the essence of a democratic state. They should be able to distinguish between truth and propaganda, to question established ways and search constantly for better solutions. It is education, which prepares them to play their roles as citizens in this way. The ideal of education for all is something that we must cling to and promote in the hope that more and more countries of the world will manage to provide it freely to all their citizens.