Education & poverty

Republished from The Hindu Online

"Education is not a way to escape poverty — it is a way of fighting it.''

— Julius Nyerere, former President of the United Republic of Tanzania

POVERTY IS much more complex than simply income deprivation. Poverty entails lack of empowerment, lack of knowledge and lack of opportunity as well as lack of income and capital. Despite increased access to education, the poor — disproportionately women, socially disadvantageous groups, the physically disabled, persons in remote regions — are often deprived of a basic education. And when basic education is available, the poorest are unable to avail of it because the direct and opportunity costs attached to it are quite high for them.

Poverty is thus both a cause and an effect of insufficient access to or completion of quality education. Children of poor families are less likely to enrol in and complete schooling because of the associated costs of attending school even when it is provided "free''. The cost of uniforms, supplies and transportation may well be beyond the means of a poor family, especially when the family has several children of school age. This means that choices have to be made, and the choice is often to drop out of school or, worse yet, to deny schooling to girls while enrolling the boys thereby contributing directly to maintaining the inferior status of women. And as poor children who are enrolled grow older, the opportunity cost (their lost labour and the forgone income it may entail) becomes greater, thus increasing the likelihood of abandoning school.

Furthermore, dropping out of school because of poverty virtually guarantees perpetuation of the poverty cycle since the income-earning potential of the child is reduced, not to mention overall productivity, receptivity to change, and capacity to improve quality of life. Lack of education perpetuates poverty, and poverty constrains access to schooling. Eliminating poverty requires providing access to quality education.

The relationship between education and poverty reduction is thus quite straight and linear as education is empowering; it enables the person to participate in the development process; it inculcates the knowledge and skills needed to improve the income earning potential and in turn the quality of life. Moreover, education of girls and women helps in improving the number of other indicators of human development.

Education thus helps to lay the foundation for the following pillars of poverty reduction:

Empowerment, human development, social development and good governance.

Basic education empowers individuals as:

* It opens up avenues of communication that would otherwise be closed, expands personal choice and control over one's environment, and is necessary for the acquisition of many other skills.

* It gives people access to information through both print and electronic media, equips them to cope better with work and family responsibilities, and changes the image they have of themselves.

* It strengthens their self-confidence to participate in community affairs and influence political issues.

* It gives disadvantaged people the tools they need to move from exclusion to full participation in their society.

* It empowers entire nations because educated citizens and workers have the skills to make democratic institutions function effectively, to meet the demands for a more sophisticated workforce, to work for a cleaner environment, and to meet their obligations as parents and citizens.

Social and economic gains

Investing in women's education results in substantial social and economic gains.

* Educated women have fewer children. In South Asia, women with no education have seven children on average; women with at least seven years of education have fewer than four children.

* Educated women have healthier children; in Africa, one out of five children dies before the age of five if the mother has no education; the probability is more than halved for children whose mothers have seven years of education. Educating women has a stronger positive effect on children's health than educating men.

* Mothers are also much more closely involved in the immediate care of children and in the critical decisions about food, sanitation and general nurturing, all of which influence children's health and development. Longer spacing between births leads to healthier children.

* Education provides women with greater opportunities for employment and income, and raises the opportunity cost of their time in economic activities compared to child rearing. Such economic gains motivate families to have fewer children.

* The vicious cycle of high birth rates, high maternal and infant mortality and endemic poverty has been transformed into a virtuous circle through investment in human capital-enhancing labour productivity, reducing fertility and mortality, raising economic growth and thus securing domestic resources for further investments in people.

Social development

* Education is an important means of facilitating and directing social change. Children (and adults) who attend school are exposed to new ideas and concepts and attitudes that form part of the basis for social change.

* The socialisation obtained by attending school includes such values as punctuality, following instructions, managing time, planning work, focusing attention, adhering to rules and receptivity to new concepts, thus helping to develop persons better suited, function effectively in a changing society.

* Education also plays an important role in cultural transmission. Transmission of culture, appreciation of cultural heritage, understanding of national history, inculcation of cultural values are all increasingly left to the schooling process as traditional societies change.

Education is a powerful tool for introducing members of a society to the system of government and the concept of governance. The school curriculum always includes considerable attending to the essential ideas of nationhood and government and to the operation and structure of government. Participation by children in classroom committees and school government lays the foundation for participation as adults in local government. Educated persons are more likely to vote and participate in local and national government. They are more likely to demand better and more accountable government, thus creating demand for improved governance. Education is linked to empowerment, and a major manifestation of empowerment is the demand for better governance.

The continuing challenge for education is to ensure that all people have the knowledge and skills necessary for continuing human and economic development and for breaking the poverty cycle. The linear relationship between education, poverty and empowerment is, however, governed by the circumstances of a country and within a country in a particular region. Education, thus, influences and is influenced by the context in which it is developed. This synergistic relationship implies that education must be in a constant state of change as it responds to changing social and economic needs and that education in itself is a force for social and economic change as people become more empowered and more productive.

K. VENKATASUBRAMANIAN

Member, Planning Commission

I agree with the article. But what the author does not discuss, and indeed what I was actually searching for when I stumbled upon this article, was the way to ensure that education empowers the poor. Right now, it is clearly failing to do so. There are no good jobs unless and until you do a graduation and a post-graduation, and that is far out of the reach of the poor. So, in that case, what difference does it make if a child has studied till fourth or till sixth or till tenth? Why drag him till tenth, thus foregoing six years of his productivity, when he could actually have earned something and been on his own all that while?

It has to make 'sense' to the poor for them to send their child to the school and not the fields.

And that is missing, I think.

And, I think that the education system is partly to be blamed for it. It is solely based on 'learning by rote', and that is such a corruption of the mind and the intelligence really! It gives you the label of 'educated' despite giving you any ability whatsoever to think for yourself or to generate new ideas.

I am of the opinion that Education can truly empower the poor only if it is relevant to their immediate surroundings.

What I want to develop is a clear idea of how that can be done. Any ideas/examples anyone?

Read here: Gandhi's experiment on the issue.