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:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)