Differential access to primary schooling: Can education promote equality in a multi-cultural society? |
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| Authors: | V Chinapah |
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| Institution: | (1) University of Stockholm, Sweden |
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| Abstract: | The concept of equality in education cannot be regarded as universally valid, although education per se is often viewed as potential social equalizer and/or an instrument for boosting economic growth. The present paper summarizes a section of the empirical evidence from a national evaluation educational survey of equality of educational opportunity at primary level in a multicultural society of the developing world-Mauritius.In Mauritius as elsewhere, education is viewed as a panacea for existing social, economic, ethnic and regional inequalities. In the Mauritian survey (Chinapah, 1983), equality of educational opportunity was examined from the standpoints of school participation and scholastic performance of primary school children differing in age, sex, ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics and belonging to four distinct educational settings: Government Rural, Government Urban, Aided Rural, and Aided Urban. The overriding thesis in the survey is the extent to which differential access to primary schooling may promote or hinder equality of educational opportunity in a complex, multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual society like Mauritius.Access to education as viewed from the numbers game, does not guarantee equal treatment in schools. For example, the explosive increases in participation in the 1950s and 60s in the OECD countries, and in the 1970s and 80s in the developing nations, have domonstrated that imbalances between ethnic/racial and socioeconomic strata tend to persist.Evidence from the survey shows that school alone cannot reduce inequalities along sex, ethnic, socioeconomic, and regional lines without a genuine effort to redress the overall problem of social, ethnic, and economic stratification which the school system quite often tends to maintain and reproduce. This paper provides the basis for a discussion of the prospects for and limitations of cross-cultural counselling in education. |
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