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I didn’t originate that idea. There is an international movement called Education For All and there have been a whole series of international conferences concerning it. The last one was the Dakar conference in 2000. These conferences are funded by organizations like the World Bank, which considers how you can bring education to all to further economic growth.

The strategy of the education for all conferences is to first establish goals.
At the Dakar conference there were a number of goals for 2015. The three most important are (1) that every child would have a primary education; (2) girls’ education will be equal to that of boys; and (3) illiteracy will be substantially reduced. There are various organizations that support this, but the recent strategy of the World Bank has focused on two things. First, they arrange loans for countries. It’s questionable I believe to focus on specific countries. Second, they’ve funded schools and teachers. I agree with people like Theodore Hesburgh Notre Dame, who maintains that we will never have global education by building schools and training teachers, we need to find other possibilities. We will never achieve universal education through schools; the problem is too big.

There are some good references for this approach. The book ‘High Noon - 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them’ by Jean-Francois Rischard is perhaps the best. Education for all is one of the problems. Education is a key problem because some of the others can only be solved by education. For example solving the water problem involves getting people to understand about water.

A recent UNESCO study shows that we are never going to achieve universal education with current methods by 2015. It looks at country after country, where they are, what has to be done and argues that we’ll never be able to do it.

To summarize, there is an international movement, it’s not just me. Elementary education is only the beginning.