UN picks wrong education partners

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon

While the speeches by President Obama, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew the biggest headlines at the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, there was a major event that went almost unnoticed: UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s launch of a plan to put education at the centre of the world’s political agenda.

Ban’s initiative, called Education First, could have been by far the