Education in the Developing World

[yongrel]

Simple question:

In the developing world, children and their families often have to choose between feeding the children and educating the children. Families depend on the income generated by the children for their very basic survival. Be it in Bangladesh, Kosovo, Brazil, or South Africa, education is simply not a viable economic option for a major portion of the population because of the opportunity costs associated with sendind a child to school.

In situations like this, how can education be brought to the poor? When they have to choose between eating that day and going to school, how can they become educated?

[Anti Federalist]

Simple question:

In the developing world, children and their families often have to choose between feeding the children and educating the children. Families depend on the income generated by the children for their very basic survival. Be it in Bangladesh, Kosovo, Brazil, or South Africa, education is simply not a viable economic option for a major portion of the population because of the opportunity costs associated with sendind a child to school.

In situations like this, how can education be brought to the poor? When they have to choose between eating that day and going to school, how can they become educated?

By making poor people rich.

That is done by embracing free markets and free societies.

Why is South Africa included on your list, last I checked they were a first world nation? ;):rolleyes::eek:

[Kludge]

In situations like this, how can education be brought to the poor? When they have to choose between eating that day and going to school, how can they become educated?

Tyranny. When there isn't enough to go around, factions must form and war to loot from and enslave the opposing factions (though it almost always just puts everyone in a far worse situation if they manage to survive).


Charity (especially from large and organized religions) could also work... If a free global internet band ever exists (really no point in discussing it given government's want to control it), those ultra-cheap and ultra-portable laptops could provide far more knowledge than any school course, so long as the kids can read. It's also possible to find an ISP willing to offer pre-paid DSL cards, which could provide limited internet access to those who are impoverished. On a much smaller scale, adoption can work.

[yongrel]

Why is South Africa included on your list, last I checked they were a first world nation? ;):rolleyes::eek:

The whites in South Africa are very well off, but AIDS has devastated the country so much that it has left millions of children orphaned or in households where they are primary breadwinners.

The have-nots in South Africa live in a developing country.

[Kludge]

By making poor people rich.

In free markets, capital is key to gaining more capital. If you have no education, you are probably less valued in a free market than in a centrally planned market.

[yongrel]

In free markets, capital is key to gaining more capital. If you have no education, you are probably less valued in a free market than in a centrally planned market.

Additionally, ignorance makes capital-destroying conflict much more frequent.

[Anti Federalist]

The whites in South Africa are very well off, but AIDS has devastated the country so much that it has left millions of children orphaned or in households where they are primary breadwinners.

The have-nots in South Africa live in a developing country.

I was leading into, with a tongue in cheek remark, a display of latent racism not fully purged I suppose: that being to suggest that freedom and free markets only work with western, white people.

With that being said, perhaps a human motivation that too often gets a black eye would work better than education and that being greed, or perhaps avarice.

Put it this way: what would better motivate you if you were in that situation: new clothes and good food or an education?

By simply showing what a free society can produce for individuals to better their lives would result in the desire to create such a society, or at least start to.

Then the education would come later.

Or to paraphrase John Adams, I believe: I study war and revolution now so that my children can study philosophy and art.

[johnfloyd6675]

Can we say that this is not our problem, and that American jihad against the problems of the Third World must be relegated to the same dustbin of history into which our revolution seeks to cast the rest of our nation's 20th-century follies?

That sounds to me like a run-on sentence, but I like it.

Also:


a centrally planned market.

I don't like the sound of that at all.