The Dangers of Education, Part II

06.04.2010

One of the solutions that the journalist in the Mother Jones article that I referred to yesterday wrote about is “education.” Ironic, of course, because I opened my entry yesterday about how depressing it can be when one is educated and able to think critically.

There have been a number of studies that have shown that when a group of people is educated, the benefits of living rise exponentially. This is self-explanatory, I think, but what surprised me greatly was the fact that most illiterate people in the world are women. Actually, that fact alone doesn’t surprise me. Men, who make up most of governments, have always tried to suppress women and a lack of education is a very good way to suppress anybody. But I digress.

I’m sure we’ve all heard of microloans where a person in a poorly developed country, mostly a woman, receives a small scale loan of some sort to help her provide for her family. It can range from a monetary loan to being provided with a goat or some other animal to help her make some money.

A Bangladeshi man by the name of “Muhammad Yunus founded Grammen (“villages”) Bank in 1983. His revolutionary model was to loan to the unloanable poor – notably women – who lacked collateral, enabling them to develop their own businesses and free themselves from poverty. This radical innovation won Yunus the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.” Next is the clincher: “Empirical studies now support his intuition of 27 years ago: Women make better loan recipients than men if your aim is to increase family well-being. Compared to men’s loans, women’s loans double family income and increase child survival twenty-fold…[In other words,] The best 21^st-century contraceptive is a Yunusian device, a microloan.”[1]

When a woman is educated enough at least to take a loan and support herself, she sees the world a little differently and may have fewer children so that they can have a better life than she growing up. More money provides an opportunity for a better quality of life.

Many Americans have a better quality of life, but I think what’s happened is we’ve become greedy. We want 4 cars for a two-adult household, we want to be able to take whatever we want and use it because, by golly, we’re entitled to it. Right? But our selfishness and greed is destroying our future. But, I guess, because we don’t immediately feel the affects of our actions daily and right away, we choose to ignore it. And as long as we keep popping out babies, the notion is that we won’t be around in 100 years to feel the affects of our decisions of today, so why should we care? Our great-grandchildren won’t know who we are personally so there’s no deep investment that far down the line. What matters is that our emotional needs of having babies are satisfied now.

I leave with the following to think about:[2]

[1] pp. 41-42.

[2] p.31.