Education is an important thing, and in the hierarchy of needs it’s high enough on the pyramid to be considered a luxury in the grand scheme of things.
If a person’s basic human needs of shelter, food and water, and security aren’t being met, then education is by necessity on the back burner. I think to myself often that if we make educational stuff available to the most people, then some people will take advantage of those materials -- but more realistically it has to be comprehensive aid if we’re focusing on education.
We need to give people shelter and food. We need them to feel at least somewhat safe or stable. And we need to provide them/sell them on education. But if that education bit doesn’t fit with their life, we still have a responsibility to feed and shelter them.
This is something that’s kind of been sitting in my mind for a while, although being in/focusing mostly on the US, Canada, and Europe, food and shelter are (mostly but definitely not near as well as they should be) covered for the majority of people. But with as much coverage as there’s been recently on just how many refugees there are and what’s going on in Europe and North Africa -- I wonder if I should be focusing solely on education.
I don’t know... I understand that no one person can do everything, and that we need people who care about education as much as we need people who care about food and shelter and security and public policy. Basically, we need teams. I just worry that I’m focusing on the wrong thing, and that kind of really bothers me. More so now that I’m applying to grad schools.
(In case you were curious, this is nothing new for me -- hence this 27 page annotated bibliography I wrote last year on government policy worldwide addressing food security, which after I’d written I thought I wanted to go into development for grad school.)
We can offer education, and we can make it free, but as they say: “If it’s inaccessible to the poor, it’s neither radical nor revolutionary.”Â
