Sunday, November 6, 2011

Earlier this summer I listened to an interview of Abhijit Banerjee on Econtalk about poverty. I found myself agreeing with what he was saying, particularly in regard to education and health for developing countries. His descriptions of programs never mentioned Eastern Europe, but parallels to Ukraine were made again and again. Below is an excerpt of the interview where he talks about education. What he is describing here is exactly what I've experienced during my Peace Corps service:



Let's turn to the role of education, which is often thought to be the biggest single barrier to development; and as many have pointed out, there have been some dreadful results and attempts to improve education. This isn't only true in developing countries; it's true in developed countries as well. I always find it ironic that people look at the ineffectiveness of government spending on education via aid and forget how ineffective American spending on education often is in our own country. Let's talk about the big picture first. You contrast what you call the demand wallahs and the supply wallahs, where wallah is a term that means "provider of." Some people suggest we need to build more schools, create more teachers in these poor countries. Others say that unless there's a reason to go to school, a reason to invest, all the schools and teachers in the world won't matter. Talk about what's true and false about those views and what we do know that can make students better educated in poor countries. We know that the demand method--when it's clear that there are benefits from education, people put more effort into it. Also the supply method--when people have schools to go to, they learn more. It's not true that you can just tell people that you should want education and then magically schools will appear. There is a lot of clear evidence that school construction and more generally making schools more available does affect the educational level. Having said that, the reason why that debate is a bit besides the point is that if you look at where the big failures are, they seem to be inflated with our putting effort into sending these children to school and schools are there and still true that people aren't learning. That's the most striking thing. The striking fact is the lack of learning in settings where there doesn't seem to be any obvious lack of demand, or any lack of supply in the sense of there being a school, a teacher, etc. I think what makes it really interesting is that fact. You see a lot of private schools in developing countries. Interesting there are private schools that the poor send their children to, $1 a month or $2 a month kinds of private schools. They are all over the developing world. These parents are very poor and for them, $2 a month is a lot of money, so they are putting effort into this. They are making sure that their kids are getting something that they value. Yet even in those schools, you see slightly better results than the government schools, but still very disappointing results even in those cases. The average kid there isn't studying at great levels, either. The problem seems to be attitude of the entire education system--the teachers, the parents, and even the children toward what the goal of education is. They seem to have the idea that the goal of education is to get through some difficult exam and get some job having got through that. And that's something that only a few people can do it, what we call a winner-take-all education. It's like education is some long large gamble, something everybody should try, but it can't work out for everybody or for most people. Whereas in fact we know that most people get something out of being educated. Even if you can read a little bit you understand what these instructions are from the doctor; you do a little bit better in bringing up your children. The benefits seem to be much more widespread than people assume. The teachers seem to assume that most of these kids are hopeless; there's no point to trying to teach them anything. They just teach to the top of the class. And the parents don't complain, because they also think that the goal of the whole system is to train somebody, to find out whether your child is one of those few lucky geniuses who is going to go on to get a good education and a fine job; and if he isn't, what's the point of educating him? Everybody is much more pessimistic about the education outcomes of the median person than they should be. So, based on that, the curricula are way too hard, the teachers don't pay any attention to any of the children falling behind in class, the parents don't complain when the children fall behind in class--either they assume that there is some rough justice there, either your kid is really smart and the education is worthwhile, otherwise there is no point. So, everybody kind of colludes with that, and the kids very quickly lose hope. They kind of figure out that they are not one of these anointed people, and they start giving up. You see these children sitting through class after class where they understand nothing. They are in fourth grade, they can't really read. They are teaching history, they understand nothing of what's going on, but they sit calmly through school and start kind of dropping out. They vote with their feet. When they are in fourth grade they are too young; maybe keep coming. But by the time they reach sixth or seventh grade, they know the school thing is not working out for them, so they just drop out. You see this pattern over and over again, of unreasonable expectations that then are effectively used to clean out most of the people in the education.

No comments:

Post a Comment