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Quality education can change the world

Comparative education offers valuable insight into the causes of and cures for injustices.

“Quality education can change the world,” said Australian Catholic University (ACU National) comparative education specialist Associate Professor Joseph Zajda.

His latest book, Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Education: Cross-Cultural Understandings, is one of his series of texts on comparative education, published by Dordrecht: Springer.

Widely published in a host of respected UNESCO and other journals, Associate Professor Zajda’s work is well-known in the US, Asia, Japan, China, Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan and India.

Commenting on his latest book, he noted that while the gender gap has narrowed in Latin America “it still remains an abyss, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where the majority of girls are still illiterate, and in rural India and rural China, Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

“And we are seeing the re-emergence of the gender gap in the former republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan,” he said.

“People don’t want to discuss slave trading and abuse, the black clouds of globalisation.” He believes critical literacy, critical thinking and reflective pedagogy can counter prejudice in all its forms. “We are trying to change the world through good education.”

Associate Professor Zajda owes his first taste of different schooling methods to personal experience. He was born in the USSR and was living in Poland when his family was sponsored to come to Australia by a Catholic Immigration Commission.

His ability to speak Polish, Ukrainian and Russian has given him continuing insight into alternative education systems, his research centring on comparisons between conformist and open systems and particularly education and social stratification in the USSR.

He has seen education underlying a number of “cultural shifts” over the decades.

“We don’t need to wait for political and economic reforms. We can do it through education. Teachers have incredible power to change the world.”