Primary and Secondary
The Education Act makes schooling compulsory from age 6 to 16. By law, education is also free, but the government does not have adequate resources to provide universal free primary education. Children are required to pay for school supplies, and communities are frequently responsible for constructing primary school buildings and teachers’ housing. Children from poor families can continue to receive tuition-free education through junior high and high school, if their grades qualify. In 2002, the gross primary enrollment rate was 46 percent, and the net primary enrollment rate was 36 percent. Gross and net enrollment ratios are based on the number of students formally registered in primary school and therefore do not necessarily reflect actual school attendance. In 1998, 26.5 percent of children ages 6 to 14 years were attending school. As of 2001, 66 percent of children who started primary school were likely to reach grade 5.
School conditions are usually reasonable with very basic equipment. Legally the size limit for one class is sixty-five students, but in many rural areas classes are much bigger because of the lack of schools. If a school is full, children may get turned away and will have to try again the next year.
There is an International School of Ouagadougou for foreign nationals.
Read more about this topic: Education In Burkina Faso
Famous quotes containing the words primary and/or secondary:
“If the accumulated wealth of the past generations is thus tainted,—no matter how much of it is offered to us,—we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves in primary relations with the soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part, with his own hands, in the manual labor of the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,
Hill-scholar, man that never is,
The bad-bespoken lacker,
Ancestor of Narcissus, prince
Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
And stones, only this imager.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)