‘Education is the golden bullet’, a cliché maybe, but that does not make it less true. As mentioned in the blog about education driving children into ‘orphanages’ (HERE) earlier this month, people all around the world are becoming more and more aware of the potential of education for lifting people out of poverty. This makes them willing to send their children to an institution to make sure that they get this marvellous chance.
Unfortunately, the damage done by institutionalisation to a child’s brain development will almost always outweigh the benefits of getting an education. For a child really to get the full benefit of being educated, this needs to be combined with growing up in a family-environment. So, we need to look for other solutions.
The cost of education is one issue. It sounds like a reasonably argument, particularly from low-income countries, that it is too costly to provide free education to all children. And yet… there are low-income countries that manage to do it and that see the benefits. The state putting money into children’s education is an investment, not throwing away money. And if a low-income country like Eritrea is able to provide free education up to the tertiary level, that pretty much proves that it can be done anywhere.
When we talk about free education, which is provided in a surprising number of countries, this refers to a lack of fees for things like registration, tuition, examination etc. However, this often does not cover all the cost involved in sending a child to school. Even in countries where education is free, parents are sometimes unable to afford to send their children to school, because they do not have the money to buy a school uniform, school books or other supplies, or they may struggle to afford the transportation fees to get their children to school.
Again, this is something that in some countries is covered by the government. Either grants or subsidies, or material provisions are handed out to help families below a certain income threshold cover all the school-related costs. Where this happens, the school attendance level usually rises dramatically. In places where the government does not help the people with this problem, there may be NGOs that help with these costs. Here is also a worthwhile role for the general public: make donations to organisations that help families send their children to school, rather than to ones that take the children away from their families to put them through school.
The cost of education is one thing, another big issue is accessibility. In some countries, particularly mountainous ones or island nations, schools are mostly present in the cities, not in remote areas or on smaller islands. In these places the solution given is usually to provide boarding schools in the cities, to allow the children to attend school. However, because of the great distance and the difficult journey, these boarding schools are de facto residential institutions, because the children are generally only able to go home once a year, if that.
Again, it seems reasonable enough when governments throw up their hands and say, what can we do. However, when you look at the solutions in other places, it turns out more can be done. There are island nations where they do provide a small school on each of the islands. There are countries where mobile schools are provided for nomadic communities. And there are countries where children who live too far away and too isolated to attend school, take part in radio or digital classrooms.
There are tried and tested solutions, used by countries of a similar income classification as the ones who claim not to have any choice. Let’s try to learn from each other and find solutions that do not involve taking children away from their families.
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