(HOST) Next week is Global Education Action Week, and commentator John Fox has been thinking about education issues around the world – and here in Vermont.
(FOX) William Butler Yeats once wrote, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of the fire.” As a lifelong educator and learner I’ve always loved that quote, being more of a fire-lighter than a pail-filler myself. As a Vermonter with children in public school, I constantly worry about the deadening effect of standardized tests on my kids’ passion for learning. I worry that their education is at times not as inspiring as it could be, that they might get bored at some point and check out. I worry every year that further budget constraints are going to drive the arts or French or some other form of enrichment completely out of the curriculum. And the list of my worries runs on…
Then I travel to Africa, or elsewhere in the developing world, and I’m propelled out, far out of the myopia of my own concerns and forced to see the big, sorry picture of education in the world as a whole. I’m reminded that seventy-seven million children worldwide receive no education at all, either inspired or uninspired, mainstream or alternative, and suddenly I feel like a hand-wringer and hair-splitter of the worst sort.
Half of the world’s uneducated children live in sub-Saharan Africa, where over thirty-four percent of children have no access to school. For them “school choice” is a question of whether, not which, and the answer is all too often “no”. Those kids dream of being able to read and own a book like mine dream of being a doctor or a dancer. Those kids will never be tested, ranked or recorded. They’re not even left behind. They’re just left out.
And the consequences are staggering. A decent education can mean personal growth and advancement; providing a pathway to achievement and success. But for the millions who’ve never seen the inside of a classroom, education is a matter of life or death. Thirty-one of the poorest countries with the worst records for primary education, are also among the thirty-six countries worst affected by HIV/AIDS. The correlation between lack of education and mortality is direct and devastating.
I once met a fifteen-year-old Maasai girl in Kenya named Leah. At fourteen, her father pulled her out of school after just two years to marry her off for a bride price of ten cows. So she ran away from home to a girls’ school where she found a sponsor to pay her tuition. With a fire in her eyes that would have done Yeats proud, she spoke of becoming a doctor and returning to help her village.
In contrast, my efforts to fine-tune my children’s education in Vermont seem self-absorbed and gratuitous. To ease my guilt and keep perspective I help a Kenyan friend send his kids to school. And having seen Leah fight for the right to learn makes me want to fight all the more to preserve and improve upon what my children have simply been given. Having connected the local to the global in this way, I’m inspired to light more fires at home and help fill more pails where they lay empty, all at once.
John Fox is an anthropologist and director of public relations at World Learning. He lives in Weston.