Challenges Facing Children: Citadel of Poverty and Trojan Horse of Education
Ye Ji Park
Republic of Korea, Korean Minjok Leadership School, 10th Grade
Most developmental psychologists define the approximate range of “childhood” as the span between 2 to 12 years of age. However, the public generally believe the range to be birth to 18 years. Developmental psychologists put huge emphasis on biological, social, and cognitive development during these early years, underlining the fact that growing up in an unstable environment will bring devastating effects. Still this fact is what is happening to approximately 1 billion children, among an estimated 2.2 billion on the planet, under the name of “poverty”.
The word “poverty” is originated from the Latin “pauper,” meaning “poor.” Practically, we define poverty as the state under low condition, especially regarding money and possessions. In economic sense, poverty means earning insufficient income to purchase essential goods and services. The income’s sufficiency is determined by the total costs of daily necessities an adult need per year, and the common international poverty line is gauged to roughly $1 a day. Based on this criterion, the World Bank estimates that 1.2 billion people in developing countries are under poverty.
However, considering the vast influence of poverty, defining poverty only economically is not enough. This is why UNICEF divided poverty into income poverty and basic-needs poverty. While the former only regards income, the latter embraces immeasurable, non-material aspects of poor conditions such as malnutrition, frequent illness, gender or race discrimination, marginalization in society, lack of access to education, etc.
Looking back in the history, it was income poverty that emerged first, ever since the dawn of civilization. Thomas Hobbes, in his famous work Leviathan, argued that three principal causes of quarrel in man’s nature – competition, diffidence, and glory – lead men to the state of war, where they seek to defend themselves or deprive other’s rights. To avoid “every man [being] against every man”, men agreed to transfer their rights to the “common power”, which Hobbes entitled “social contract”. The formation of society, therefore, naturally brings out “the authority” and “the submissioners”. Under “the authority”, “the submissioners” cooperated by specializing labor, resulting surplus values. The surplus, usually distributed unfairly around men of power, caused economic gap between “the authority” and “the submissioners”.
It was income poverty that summoned the basic-needs poverty. Earning insufficient money, the impoverished could not pay for food, proper medical treatment, or professional education. Living in these dire conditions, it is the children who suffer the most; mind, body, and spirit cannot possibly prosper, or even sustain, within such conditions.
One major biological harm caused by income poverty is HIV/AIDS. According to UNESCO IICBA (International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa), the population of HIV infectees reach to 30 million, among which two-thirds (21 million) are from sub-Saharan Africa. IICBA explains poverty’s influence on AIDS outbreak in two ways; first, through rapid rural-urban migration, people are extricated from the traditional conditions or public eyes, thus tend to practice risky sexual behavior. Second, the poor—especially young women, often the head of most impoverished homes—often use their sexuality commercially as the most convenient and immediate way to earn money. Despite society’s warnings about danger of infection, the poor refuse to give up rewards from sexual transactions and stay impassive to the caution. Considering that most wandering populations are young, it is inferable that the major target of AIDS damage is “children”, primarily girls aged 15-17. It is estimated that 9.5 million of sub-Saharan AIDS infectees are in this range. In addition, income poverty also results malnutrition; UNICEF estimated that child malnutrition densely exists in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—representatively low-income regions—not to mention that more than half of children in these regions are anemic.
Impoverished children also suffer from social deterioration, both externally and internally. The “external” is “the authority” discriminating “the submissioners,” a process which, in common terms, is called marginalization – relegation to remote places of the society. Because the poor, pressed for money, cannot participate actively in enactment of social services and programs, they fail to reflect their needs to society. As this phenomenon continues, the social works would be dominated by the rich, a state that may discriminate and further marginalize the impoverished. Meanwhile, the “internal” is the discrimination within the poor – a typical example is gender inequality. According to OECD, the lower the capita GDP is, the higher the GID index, and the more widespread gender discrimination is. (GID index is the indicator of gender inequality over four fields: areas of family (marriage tradition, etc.), physical integrity (rape, assault, etc.), civil liberty (given rights to vote, etc.) and ownership rights (private ownership of property.) It is uncertain why gender inequality is more severe in poor countries; one assumption is that poor countries usually have stricter and patriarchal traditions. Experience of marginalization and discrimination, in child’s development, would impede them from associating with rest of the society.
With all of the above in mind, the most significant effect that income poverty has brought against the welfare of children is on cognitive development—mostly intellectual, due to lack of access to education. Education is often considered as a luxury for impoverished children; Madhu Pandit Dasa, the Chairman of The Akshaya Patra Foundation in India, claimed, “When children do not even have access to food, there is no possibility for education”. Because education does not promise immediate food on the table, poor parents turn their children over to labor; according to IOL (International Labor Organization), approximately 166 million children from ages 5 to 14 are working a maximum of 16 hours a day. Tuition fees are also a significant obstacle for the poors. Eric A. Hanushek and Finish Welch claim that governments in poor countries use 34 times of educational funds on post-secondary education than on primary education. However, since most poor children have never received basic education, economic support on professional education is meaningless; most students, enrolled in primary schools, are burdened with high costs for education.
Lack of education is of utmost importance because it intensifies income poverty. The “primary” relationship between income poverty and basic-needs poverty is that the former created the latter;
the “subsidiary” relationship is the reverse, as lack of access to education deepens the income gap. In modern society, simple manufacturing labor is no more the general trend; technological developments demands the workers be prepared with qualified skills, which can be only achieved through professional education, troubling the poorly-educated to search jobs. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the employment rate of workers with college degrees (87.8%) is 12% higher than that of workers with high school diploma and 40% higher than that of workers with less than high school diploma. As higher unemployment rate leads to less income, a vicious cycle is formed among income poverty and lack of education.
The more cycle continues, the bigger the gap between rich and poor will continue to grow. This is, actually, what is happening right now; most of the world’s wealth is concentrated in a few percent of the world’s population. According to the UNU-WIDER (United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research) study, 85% of global assets belong to the richest 10% of world population. Gini coefficient, the number that measures economic inequality (the higher the coefficient, the more inequality), had also increased from 62.5 to 66 during 1998~1993, a dramatic change within only five years.
Thus, to bank up this incessant stream of poverty that sweeps away millions of children, we must break the cycle. The question is, which side to destroy first—income poverty, or lack of access to education? Surely, the choice should be made based on how much actual support the decision can bring to the suffering children.
If our target is income poverty, it is doubtful whether our assistance could influence children’s life. According to the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) survey, 59% of Afghans view “public dishonesty (corruption)” as a more serious social issue than “insecurity” (54%) or “unemployment” (52%). The survey also estimated that in 2009, the Afghans paid roughly $2.5 billion for bribery, approximately 23% of the year’s GDP. Such frequent occurrence of corruption makes us be doubtful; aids given to poor countries have high possibility of being abused by the authority, rather than helping children to live better life.
On the other hand, supporting education is a great way to improve the children’s life directly, and one step further, to eradicate poverty. By providing children education opportunity, we provide them an ideal future; higher possibilities of getting a better job and pay, and lower possibility of suffering from diseases and discriminations. Once they achieve this future, they would provide the same opportunity they received to their children; a “virtuous cycle” would appear, then, demolishing the poverty slowly but steadily.
The possible solutions for the challenge, the suggestions we can try on to expand access to education are classified into three categories; teacher training, supplement of school resources (classroom, stationery, etc.), and a decline in tuition.
Roughly 20% of primary school teachers in more than half countries in sub-Saharan Africa and 30% in South Asia are not fully trained for teaching. The government needs to set up clear qualifications in hiring new teacher. For example, Nepal had once acknowledged anyone who received at least one month of training as a teacher. However, recently Nepal reinforced its loose requirement, demanding teachers to receive pre-service training of minimum ten months. Additionally, the government needs to stimulate current teachers by incentives; if the government promises “pay-for-performance”—paying teachers according to their students’ achievement—teachers would work harder for higher pay.
There are already attempts to replenish education resources. Volunteer organizations, such as Habitat, are recruiting workers to expand classrooms. They already had built rooms in Ali Abad community, North Afghanistan, benefiting 200 students, and they will keep on their job. By encouraging the public and volunteer clubs in high schools and universities to partake in these voluntary works, poor students could escape from the dense, tiny classrooms. Meanwhile, the HOPEN project—the name “HOPEN” as a compound of “hope” and “pen”—is currently ongoing in Korea with twenty high schools involved. HOPEN members hold regular campaign in each school, collecting students’ used pens and notebooks. The collected stationery is delivered to Mongolia, Cambodia, Nepal, and other mondial regions. If the project is diffused over high schools in various countries, the collection would be large enough to provide to all poor children.
Curtailment in tuition is the most efficacious way to promote education. The government should spend more expenditure on primary education, not on tertiary, so to induce people pursue at least most basic level of education. Once people’s perception changes, and the pressure about tuition fee lessens, children’s enrollment will greatly increase; in Ghana, actually, once the fee was destroyed, there was 7% increase in preschool enrollment, 11.4% in primary, and 12.2% in junior secondary.
James P. Grant, former Executive Director of UNICEF, stated that “Children and women can be out Trojan Horse for attacking the citadel of poverty”. Poverty is definitely citadel, the one much adamant and indomitable that has lasted ever since the beginning of human society. Since it is human nature to form the society, and the natural law of society is to set order of “the authority” and “the submissioners”, the citadel of poverty would never collapse, unlike Troy. Nevertheless, the rampart can at least be destroyed partially by operating the Trojan Horse, which is, helping children to escape the morass of poverty by providing access to education. Once the first generation built their Trojan Horse, they will inherit the same opportunity of education to their children, so that the second Trojan Horse will be built. As time goes by, hundreds of Trojan Horses will create cumulative effect so that most of the citadel would fall apart. Then a possibly immature but still sound period will finally approach us from the long, long war with poverty.
Bibliography
UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund). 2000. Poverty Reduction Begins with Children. New York.
World Bank. 2000. Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise. Washington, D.C.
Hanushek, Eric Alan, and Finis Welch, eds. Handbook of the Economics of Education. Vol. 2. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006. Print.
Cohen, Desmond. "Poverty And HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa." HIV/AIDS: Policy -.27 HIV/AIDS Electronic Library Series. Web. 31 Dec. 2011.
<http://library.unesco-iicba.org/English/HIV_AIDS/cdrom materials/Poverty.htm >.
Nock, Stephen, and et al. "Teachers For All: What Governments And Donors Should Do." VSO International. Global Campaign for Education, April 2006. Web. 2 Jan. 2012.
<http://www.vsointernational.org/Images/GCE_Teachers_For_All_tcm76-22710.pdf>.
Spagnoli, Filip. "The Causes of Poverty (15): Gender Discrimination." P.A.P. Blog - Human Rights Etc. .3 Oct. 2008. Web. 30 Dec. 2011.
<http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/human-rights-facts-68-poverty-and-gender-discrimination/>.
Seberkste, Bianca, and Michal Kielar, eds. "Education in Developing Countries." Website of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2010. Web. 2 Jan. 2012.
<http://www.bmz.de/en/what_we_do/issues/Education/hintergrund/bildungsituation/index.html>.
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This is an essay I submitted for Gulen Youth Platform 2012, which is an international essay contest held by Gulen Institute, University of Houston. I spent quite lot of time writing this piece, and it would be lie to say that I did not expect winning at all. Thus, it is quite bitter that I didn't win the prize, but I would regard it as meaningful to participate, attempting to win in an international contest, and console myself that it was a great opportunity to write a new type of essay - explanatory, professional, a lot of research and a bunch of bibliography - which is, actually, very true. Special thanks for Mr.Garrioch, who gave me munificent advice to improve my essay.
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