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:
“As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“... in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment ...”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)