Abstract
Education expansion, a key development goal in India, China and Indonesia, has proceeded at very different paces. At the most basic level, while all countries have a certain number of years of compulsory schooling as a requirement, each country has had a varying degree of success in achieving its target. Indonesia and China both have 9 years of compulsory basic education as a goal, but recent data showed that at least one third of Indonesian children are not completing lower secondary school, while in China lower secondary enrollment reached what seems to be a ‘saturation point’ at 93 %. India has set itself the goal of achieving free and compulsory education for all children between the ages of 6 and 14, though from the available data, it has had a hard time achieving even universal primary education from Grades 1 through 5. This synthesis chapter also examines issues related to the quality of education, the persistence of illiteracy among adults and the reduction in the gender and socioeconomic gaps in educational attainment. It concludes with a discussion of education’s many auxiliary benefits, from health and family planning attitudes to individual identity and escape from inherited status, human capital investment and employment.
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Notes
- 1.
School life expectancy (primary and lower secondary) indicates how many years children of primary and lower secondary school going age are likely to spend in the education system excluding repeated grades, assuming that the probability of a child being enrolled in school at any particular age is equal to the current enrolment ratio for that age.
- 2.
India did embark on mass adult literacy programs, but failed to reach their targeted improvements in adult literacy. Indeed, improving literacy of older age groups is undoubtedly difficult in areas with already low literacy levels, but interestingly, India’s experience found that adult literacy was also slow to improve in high literacy areas, likely due to misaligned incentives due to adults’ access to ‘literate proxies’ in the form of literate family members.
- 3.
The de facto enumeration started in the 2010 census while the 2001 census was done on a de jure basis.
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Ramchand, D.S. (2016). Education in China, India and Indonesia: an Overview. In: Guilmoto, C., Jones, G. (eds) Contemporary Demographic Transformations in China, India and Indonesia. Demographic Transformation and Socio-Economic Development, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24783-0_13
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