Tuesday 3 May 2011

What Stops Children going to school in rural areas?
I try here to offer a rational view, I am not sure if it will conform to any set of opinions or moral view point, it is what I think is the reality of situation. I think that sometimes it is wrong to even approach this in a purely intellectual and scholastic manner. The circumstances by which those who come to study this great moral affliction in the comparison of the developing world to our own society are sometimes not prepared to understand the simple needs of people.
Poverty is the great leveller, its needs are simple, and at its basest level it requires access to basic resources. This is a mortal desire, its morality can be bought, and it is bought in the nefarious system of piracy and plunders which is our stamp of civility and pre-eminence amongst all the peoples of the Earth. It is perhaps a spurious argument to consider that we act as a vacuum upon all the resources if the world and we live in Luxury more than ever has been seen through all the ages. However, this is not the purpose of this; I am not here to find absolutes in what is and what is beyond my control
Children do not go to school in rural areas because the education offered is irrelevant to those basic needs. They need to be taught practical skills that are constant with the lives they will live, it needs to be taught at their level, it must provide something useful and it must be regarded as something profitable.
There is no reason to teach them our philosophy, their culture is different, this is not a criticism, each society develops its own morality, it is a good and moral thing to go to the developing world and construct a building which you call a School, or a Hospital. There is very little chance that this shed will be used as anything other than another house without first embedding in the ethnic society a construct of values by which education is seen as a good thing. If it is pointed towards teaching them how to grow better crops, how to feed their animals, and how to fend off the governments, then perhaps this inexplicable degradation by which the rural poor are urbanised can perhaps be stymied.
It is all very well providing information by which these people can learn, however, never under-estimate their self interest and their intelligence, it is not stupidity that makes these people act as they feel, it is their human will. An incentive is always needed, because there are many others for them to desire if you offer none greater
We live in the modern world, we do not remember how it feels to hunger, to thirst, this has allowed moving forward in terms of grander human relations, but, until those in the developing world share this abundance it is difficult for them to understand our education. It has no purpose for them, it is something they do because if they do you give them medicine or food. At their core, they desire basic resources, and if these are provided there is a possibility.
An opportunity must be provided by which the means are provided that they would first be would be free from their daily struggle to merely survive and then perhaps they would see the truth in the rewards of education.
This is my greatest hope because then perhaps the actuality which presents itself to me. I find myself in a situation by which my consumption, which does not satisfy me in any great particularity, of cheap fabrics and the like, is made by these the rural poor as they are evacuated to the cities, like we once were to work in the Factories.
Is History a movement by which all the nations and tribes become like us? Are we even an example to follow? Will our Education clear them into the cities and perhaps in two hundred years they will be modern like us?
I do not believe this, I think that if you provide the means by which the rural poor can provide for themselves, the first step is to ease their pain, ease their pangs, and then you will see.
Perhaps all the economies of all the nations on Earth will continue to grow exponentially until the end of times. The first tenet of Economics is that all things tend towards equilibrium. Can it be argued that our economies have reached their capacity and that they are incapable of increasing growth without exploiting resources beyond its border? These questions are for the Statisticians and their spurious equations.
Education must always be practical, it is no use teaching people things for what they have no use, it turns them against education. The first lesson must be self-reliance; if this succeeds it will embed within the culture a perception that it is a positive force rather than something akin to Protestant Missionaries who are for some peculiar reason Lionised for their bourgeois ignorance