ESSAYS
Express yourself: Promoting freedom of expression for children through education by Marjorie Scardino Marjorie Scardino is Chief Executive of Pearson, the international education and media business made up of Pearson Education, Penguin and the Financial Times Group. Until January 1997, she was chief executive of The Economist Group, and, prior to 1985, she was a partner in a law firm in Savannah, Georgia (United States). Marjorie and her husband, Albert Scardino, founded and published the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper The Georgia Gazette. They have three children.
round the world, we yearn for economic and political self-determination, because we yearn for the liberty to express ourselves. Our expressions – whether words or pictures, art or music, the physical sport of soccer or the intellectual sport of numbers – hold our ideas, our dreams and the images we have of ourselves. A child without education and freedom of expression cannot develop. That has been the goal of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and it is a goal that should move us all, and has for two decades.
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My perspective is from the private sector, as head of an education and media company that tries to help people of all ages in more than 60 countries express themselves by helping to educate them both formally and informally. “It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them,” religious and educational philosopher John Henry Newman wrote back in 1852. Twenty years ago, the Convention outlined a similar principle: that if a child had a ‘right’ to education, then he might as a consequence obtain access to the information and freedom of expression that would, in the words of the Preamble, help him be “fully prepared to live an individual life in society.” While the Convention includes more than 50 articles, I want to focus here only on the power of those three areas – education, information and expression. These have enlightened specific initiatives in our company and shown us how to play a role – often in partnership with governments and non-governmental organizations – in ensuring that children have access to education and that they have diverse experiences in the process. To take three examples that we know well: In Angola, we are working with the Ministry of Education and the Monteno Institute for Language and Literacy, a South African not-for-profit group, to introduce 1 million students to textbooks in the indigenous languages they speak at home but have never seen in print. This is an undertaking that Angola’s Government believes will raise its struggling literacy rate. With partners such as the Government of the United Kingdom and not-for-profit organizations JumpStart, BookTrust and Book Aid International, we have engaged in large-scale projects that get books into the hands of children and encourage parents to read aloud to them. One of our websites, ‘Poptropica’, combines gaming with education – in a way that has attracted 40 million children in 70 countries speaking 90 different languages – to engage with each other in learning math, science, history and other subjects. Too often, we assume that a private company’s purpose is profits, and its concentration on the larger society is just an obligatory sidelight. A private company dedicated to the long term is surely sustained by profits, because it has no other livelihood; but this company is
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THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S CHILDREN | SPECIAL REPORT