UNESCO has dedicated International Education Day of 2023 to which country's girls and women ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), Afghanistan. The United Nations observes the International Day of Education on 24 January, a day proclaimed by the General Assembly in 2018 and first marked in 2019, and UNESCO leads the observance. For 2023 the Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, dedicated the day to the girls and women of Afghanistan and renewed the organisation's call for the immediate restoration of their fundamental right to education. UNESCO marked the day with an event at the United Nations headquarters in New York, with contributions from the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the General Assembly as well as the Director-General, and the first panel discussion of that event was devoted to the education of girls and women in Afghanistan. The reason for the dedication was the situation created after the de facto authorities in Kabul barred girls from secondary schools and women from universities: at the time of the observance about eighty per cent of school-aged Afghan girls and young women — some two and a half million — were out of school. The dedication was therefore not a commemorative gesture but a form of pressure, using the annual observance to keep an exclusion that had been imposed by administrative order in the international view. For an examination written in June 2023 this was a well-reported event of the preceding January, and it belongs to the small set of United Nations observances that MPSC returns to regularly. Note that the paper calls it the 'International Education Day', while the United Nations name for it is the International Day of Education; the day intended is not in doubt. Option (2) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Iran is the strongest of the three wrong options, and a candidate who chooses it is usually reasoning from real news rather than from nothing. Iran had been prominent in the international coverage of women's rights through late 2022 and into 2023, following the protests that began in September 2022, and any question about an international body speaking up for girls and women will draw a candidate towards it. The 2023 International Day of Education was nonetheless dedicated to Afghan girls and women, because the exclusion there was categorical — girls barred from secondary schooling and women from universities by order — and directly concerned education, which is UNESCO's mandate. The discrimination worth carrying is that between a country in the news and a country in the news for the specific subject of the observance. An observance dedicated by an education organisation will be dedicated on educational grounds.  (c) Israel has no connection with the 2023 International Day of Education, which UNESCO dedicated to the girls and women of Afghanistan. The option is present as a recognisable country from the international news of the period rather than for any reason connected to education, and it functions in the same way as an unfamiliar name in an appointment question: it occupies a slot that a guessing candidate cannot eliminate. The way to make such options harmless is to fix the observance to the reason it was dedicated. The 2023 dedication was a response to a specific and continuing exclusion of girls and women from schools and universities by the authorities of one country, and once that reason is in mind, only one of the four options can satisfy it. Preparing observances by their theme and occasion rather than by their date alone is what makes this possible.  (d) Vietnam has no connection with the 2023 International Day of Education and is the weakest option in the set. It is offered as a fourth country with no particular association, which is a common construction: an option set of four countries in which one is the answer, one is a plausible near-miss and two are simply filler. Recognising which options are filler is a real examination skill, because it tells the candidate where the question is actually being decided — here between Afghanistan and Iran, the two countries whose treatment of girls' and women's education had been in the news. Having narrowed the question that far, the candidate can bring the specific fact to bear: it was Afghanistan, where girls were barred from secondary school and women from university, that UNESCO named in dedicating the day.

Concept: The International Day of Education, observed on 24 January, was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2018 and first marked in 2019, and it is led by UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, founded in 1946 with its headquarters in Paris. The day exists to press the case that education is both a human right in itself and the means by which other rights are secured, and it is tied to Sustainable Development Goal 4 on inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all. Each year's observance carries a theme, and in some years, as in 2023, a dedication to a particular situation. The Afghan case is the sharpest test of the day's premise anywhere in the world: after August 2021 the de facto authorities progressively closed secondary schooling to girls and, in December 2022, universities to women, so that a majority of Afghan girls of school age were excluded from education by order rather than by poverty, distance or custom. UNESCO's response has been to document the exclusion, keep it on the agenda of the General Assembly and use its own observances to renew the demand that the right be restored. India's engagement with the same goal runs through the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 and Article 21A of the Constitution.

State PCS 2023 Q98 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q98 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer