Gabriel Begun
WR 100
Professor Michaud
Essay 3
In the past century, human kind has expanded 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 people still live 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 address these issues, but our efforts have not been enough. We have been dealing with these problems as independent issues, and we have failed to see that almost all of them could be solved by breaking the patterns of those societies. It is with education that we can help people the most. A basic education can help make illiterate people communicate with the rest of the world and it can help individuals obtain a better job. Essentially, if we invest in education and we create free schools for children, we can encourage individuals to learn how to help themselves, changing destructive conduct 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. In 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 higher education. 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 for Kristof’s article and that first donation, Dai would not have had the opportunity to succeed and she would have probably stayed in the family’s shack for the rest of her life.
Unfortunately, $13 dollars a year per child is still a lot of money for basic education. Many families cannot spend such an amount and it is their governments responsibility to ensure that their citizens are educated. Countries should contemplate programs that will make more of their citizens attend school. Investing in education is in the countries best interest because it has been proven that an educated society has a higher 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 educating both men and women in East Asia, the work force was doubled and families can now rely on the spouse to generate income as well. Saima, a women in Pakistan whose story is told in 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 the 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 create businesses of their own, but it also helps them educate themselves by creating groups where the women can talk about and discuss important issues to them. Creating dialogues is of the utmost importance if we are to break the cycle of poverty. By talking to each other, the women question their realities and defy the principal of powerlessness and ignorance.
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 on 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 higher 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 taught 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 well-educated women who come from very different backgrounds. However, all of Nafisi’s students have one thing in common: they are living in an oppressed society where they, as women, have barely no rights. Nafisi expresses her concern for her students: “’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 became a space for the women to express themselves and promote independent thinking. It created a fantasy world in the girls’ minds 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 Nafisi herself leaves Tehran for the Unites States. We understand the impact of Nafisi on her students during a discussion that erupts. 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 dialogue.
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 large economies are more developed and therefore will continue having higher incomes, 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 $1.3 trillion 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 than is necessary. Professor X continues his paper and shows other astonishing numbers stating that “The Manhattan Project had a cost of approximately $2 billion dollars, which would be an equivalent to $23 billion dollars today. 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 spent by our political leaders on military campaigns are enough to ensure that every citizen in the planet receives at least a basic education. As a matter of fact, it may be enough money to solve many of our recent world problems like hunger or violence.
Some world leaders have acknowledged that more money is spent on the military than what is necessary. Mark Lander, New York Times reporter interviews Hilary Clinton in his article A New Gender Agenda. Hilary Clinton was first lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001 and is currently the United States Secretary of State. Clinton explains how she has been working in favor of women’s rights; arguing that the best way to help women is by helping them to economically empower themselves and by helping them obtain a better education. Clinton addresses many global issues throughout her interview and also talks about America’s foreign policy. When she is asked if she believed that “some of the billions of dollars the United States has spent on military aid to Pakistan since 9/11 [would] have been better spent on education and health care for girls and women?” She answers “Yes. The answer is yes, and in my meetings with then-President Musharraf in ’03, ’05, ’07, in this country as well, I raised it all the time.” (Clinton 28). Clinton’s open way to the question is interesting because she accepts that the US military campaign was not the best way to deal with Pakistan. Her simple response to the question shows that she is confident with her answer. Clinton acknowledges the importance of education but she also emphasizes that it is not the only possible solution.
Regardless of how much money is spent on military campaigns, it is true that every government has social justice programs that receive a considerable amount of the nation’s resources. A perfect example of these type of programs is t Oportunidades, 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. We must do this not only because having educated societies promotes individuals to obtain a higher incomes, we 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 helpful and inspiring. However, this is not enough. We must learn to promote economic and humanitarian projects 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
Clinton, Hillary. “A New Gender Agenda.” Interview by Mark Landler. The New York Times Magazine. 18 Aug. 2009. Web. 22 April. 2011.
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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