Schooling is one of the most formative experiences of a young person’s life. How one is schooled affects a child development indelibly. Both the First World and the Third World can learn from each other’s experiences. In the West the overarching impediment to proper education is child having more rights that the teacher. If the teacher only had to cope with a dozen pupils perhaps this approach would suffice but in classes of forty and even more, all the happens is that the disruptive child impinges upon the learning of the rest of the class.

In the third world, the powers of the teacher to discipline incalcitrant and errant children has not yet circumscribed by children’s rights but what they gain from being more studious is a patent lack of appropriate facilities and in some instances excessive corporal punishment.

Main picture: The Maths teacher and his class in a Cairo school in 1922

The remaining blight on education is the continued refusal of many governments especially those in the Middle East to allow females to receive an edcation. The barbaric Taliban regime in Afghanistan even went so far as to ban females from attending school. The most famous example in this regard is the recent incident where the Taliban in Pakistan attempted to assassinate Malala for her pro-schooling campaign for girls.

Where females have been granted full educational rights such as in the Occident, their exemplary performance in most fields where they outperformed their male counterparts have engendered a new breed of females who can be regarded as equals in every sense instead of being at the mercy of the whims of their male companions.

The full impact of such a revolutionary change has not yet been fully felt by the fabric of society but already its impact has been stunning from lower birth rates and more equality demanded in relationships but the housework still remains an unequal partnership.

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