In the past century, human kind has moved and reached places no one had ever imagined. We have pushed our boundaries in almost all fields including communication, technology, medicine, engineering and more. However, these astonishing breakthroughs are only accessible to an elite group of humanity. Most of humankind still lives under the poverty line; prostitution, gang rape and honor killings are part of the daily life of millions of citizens; and children die because of hunger by the thousands every day. In the past decades, we have created institutions that work with these issues, but our efforts have not been enough. We have been dealing with the problems as independent issues and we have failed to see that almost all of them could be solved by breaking the patterns those societies live in. Essentially, if we invest in education and we create schools where children can attend for free, we can promote individuals to learn how to help themselves, changing destructive conducts and cultural habits.
When it comes to education, most of us will agree that it is a very important thing and that having a basic education is essential to surviving in our world. Yet millions of children do not have access to it. Co-authors, journalists, and married couple, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn address this and many other issues in their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. On chapter ten, “Investing in Education”, Kristof and WuDunn tell the story of a girl named Dai Manju who was raised in the Daba Mountains of central China. Dai Manju grew up in a shack two hours away from the closest road with her parents, two brothers and a pig. When Dai was in sixth grade her parents asked her to drop out. “The school fee - $13 a year for elementary school – seemed a waste of the family’s tattered banknotes when that money could be used for something useful, like buying rice.” (Kristof and WuDunn 167). Kirstof wrote an article about Dai and received a donation that allowed her to finish her basic education and then get a scholarship for a higher education degree. Dai is now a major tycoon and constantly sends money back home to her parents who now live in a concrete house. Dai’s story is just one of the millions of women who have an incredible potential to succeed, but because they cannot afford school (which is already cheaper than it usually is in the West) they are forced to drop out. If it had not been by Kristof’s article and by that first donation, Dai would not have had the opportunity to become the best of her and she would have probably stayed in the family’s shack for the rest of her life.
Unfortunately, $13 dollars a year is still a lot of money for basic education. Countries should contemplate programs that will make more of their citizens attend school. Investing in education is in the countries best interests because it has been proven that an educated society has a better income than an uneducated one. Kristof and WuDunn explain that “It is generally accepted that one of the reasons East Asia has prospered in recent decades is that it educates females and incorporates them in to the labor force, in a way that has not been true in India or Africa” (Kristof and WuDunn 171). By education both men and women, the work force is duplicated and the families are now not only dependent on the husbands work (sometimes this being barley enough to feed the husband on its own) and can now relay on the spouse to make bring income as well. Saima, a women in Pakistan whose story is told on chapter eleven “Microcredit: The Financial Revolution” of Half the Sky, received a microcredit of $65 with which she bought beads and cloth to make beautiful embroidery and make a profit by selling it in the markets. Saima’s microcredit was given to her by Kashf Foundation, which “is typical of microfinance institution in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of twenty-five, who guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make their payments and discuss a social issue. Topics include family planning, schooling for girls or hudood laws used to punish rape victims” (Kristof and WuDunn 188). Kashf Foundation does a great job because not only does it give women an incentive to make businesses of their own, but it also helps them educate themselves by creating groups where the women can dialog and discuss the issues that are important to them. Creating dialogs is of the uttermost importance if we are to break the cycle people under the poverty line live in.
It may very well be that lack of education is one of the problems our world is facing, yet one can argue that a more urgent problem is hunger. The way we have often dealt with hunger is by making donations and feeding those who need food now. The problem with this approach is that it creates dependence by those who receive help to those who give it. A smarter, more effective approach is the one taken by the World Food Programme (WFP) and UNICEF. The WFP is a program that sends food to local schools and asks from the parents to volunteer and prepare the meals for the children. This way, all children who attend school get a free meal every day. In some cases, children are permitted to take food back to their homes. “School feeding programs cost just ten cents per child per day, and researchers have found that they considerably improve nutrition, reducing stunting, and increases school attendance, especially for girls.” (Kristof and WuDunn 174). As we have seen, promoting an education eventually helps those who are being educated to earn a bigger income and properly feed their families on their own. The WFP is an effective program because for a very cheap price – 10 cents per child per day – the problem of education and hunger are dealt with.
A different approach we must also consider is non-institutionalized education. Being a student in an institution is usually very time consuming and not much time is left to earn a living (in most cases earning a living has a priority over being educated). Azar Nafisi, ex-professor of the University of Tehran, tells the story of a class on English Literature she thought once a week in her living room in Iran. Nafisi’s book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, serves as both a memoir of Nafisi and her students and as proof of how important education can be. All of Nafisi’s students are women with a higher education degree and they come from very different backgrounds. All of Nafisi’s students have one thing in common: they are living in an oppressed society where they, as women, have barley no rights. Nafisi expresses her perception of her students thinking aloud says: “’I was thinking about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, about the fact that my girls are not happy. What I mean is that they feel doomed to be unhappy”’ (Nafisi 281:4).The class quickly becomes a space for the women to express themselves and discover who they truly are. It created a fantasy world in the girls where they could escape their reality and dream. They had a space where they could talk, discuss and most importantly be themselves. As the memoir approaches its end, where Nafisi herself leave Tehran for the Unites States, we understand the impact of Nafisi in her students because of a discussion that erupts where Manna, one of Nafisi students argues against her colleagues: “’I mean, you set up a model for us’ – she turned to me [Nafisi] – ‘that staying here is useless, that we should all leave if we want to make something of ourselves’” (Nafisi 325:6). Nafisi then responds that it was not her intention to send this specific message to her students. However, it is clear that these thoughts are in the students minds because they had a space to continue their education and continue their dialog.
As we have seen, promoting education is a key factor if we want to allow individuals to make the best of their potential beings. Nevertheless, it is often argued that we do not have the funds to make these investments. It is, however, common knowledge that the world has sufficient resources to feed, house and educate every person on this planet. The problem is that those resources are wrongly distributed favoring developed nations and allowing countries with power to maintain their status. The countries that have a large economic power are more developed and therefore will continue having a bigger income, not allowing other countries to grow as well. Professor X, founder and director of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngster, discusses in his essay War in numbers: How much and by who the amount of money spent in the past decade on warfare: “It is estimated that in the year 2007 an approximate of $1,339,000,000,000 was cumulative spent by all nations on their military budget. The study done by The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute shows an astonishing figure that proves our society is still not as developed as we presume it to be” (Professor X 1). As Professor X points out, more money is being spent on military campaigns that it probably should. Professor X continues his paper and shows more astonishing number starting that “The Manhattan Project had a cost of approximately $2 billion dollars, which would be an equivalent to $23 billion dollars now a days. That sum includes building the two bombs that were deployed and a third one that was used for testing. In the world today, there exist between 8,000 and 10,000 active nuclear warheads, each with a price of $4 to $20 million dollars” (Professor X 2). It does not take a great mathematician to notice that there is a lot of money being invested in weapons that we all wish will never use. The effort and resources that is being spent by our political leaders on military campaigns is enough to ensure that every citizen in the planet receives at least basic education. As a matter of fact, it may be enough money to solve many of our recent world problems like the resections, hunger and STD’s spread.
Regardless of how much money is spent on military campaigns, it is true that every single government has social justice programs that receive a considerable amount of the nation’s resources. A perfect example of this type of programs is the program Oportunidades that is founded by the Mexican government. Oportunidades consists of giving money to families under the poverty line for sending their children to school and maintaining certain health prevention standards. “Grants range from $10 per month for a child in the third grade to $66 for a girl in high school (grants are highest for high school girls because their dropout rates are the highest)” (Kristof and WuDunn 173:3). One of the reasons most children drop out of elementary school is because they are needed in their homes to help out. The project Oportunidades is considered one of the world’s best anti-poverty programs because, like the WFP, it helps break the cycle families under the poverty line usually encounter themselves in.
The world must invest in education. They must do this not only because having educated societies promotes individuals to make a better income, they must do this because as humans we have a responsibility to maintain unity with each other and help those who need it. Every project that exists in favor of Human Rights, like Oportunidades, Kashf Foundation and WFP are amazing and inspiring. However, it is not enough. We must learn to love more than we hate so we can stop wasting trillions of dollars a year in military campaigns and direct our efforts to making the world truly a better place.
Works Cited
Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl WuDunn. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. New York: Vintage, 2010. Print
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2008. Print.
Professor X. War in numbers: how much and by who. New York: X Academy, 2010. Print.
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