Education
About half of Sudanese children go to school, falling as low as 20% in some areas. Most schools are in urban areas. Many have been destroyed in the last 20 years of disorder. Most education is primary-level. The literacy rate is around 60%, and improving.
Female education was one of the priorities of the colonial government, despite considerable cultural suspicion, and progress continued after independence in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman arose out of this movement.
In September 1990 the new Bashir government ordered that Arabic should replace English in all education, and changed the curriculum to an Islamic-based system.
In Southern Sudan the Jesuit Refugee Service has been building schools.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Sudan
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)
“The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between the different classes of men. Nature, reason, and Christianity recognize no other. Pride may say Nay; but Pride was always a liar, and a great hater of the truth.”
—Susanna Moodie (1803–1885)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)