Education is paramount to the development of economies in impoverished and war-torn countries

Agree

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by PinayWriter

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I am in an impoverished country.
I graduated in a state university. Actually I graduated from THE state university of my country. People call me a trophy child for my parents.

Why?

I was LUCKY enough to live in a time when the economy allowed my parents who are middle class professionals to pay for my education. My brothers are not so lucky.

The university that I graduated from had to increase the tuition fee. And as the cheapest prominent university in the country, it provided the scale for the tuition for other schools. But because it has needed to pay the teachers more and build better facilities it needed to do the worst. It had to privatize its funding.

Why?

Because our lofty government leaders decided fighting terrorists with other lofty governments were better than funding the education of the future generation.

A Muslim student from the southern part of our country made news because he and his father went to the big city using borrowed money to travel and try to get a scholarship so that he could go to my school. But they got a bracket that made them pay more than they could afford to. So they had to go back home. It was like telling someone that they won the lottery but they were not liable to cash it out.

And they think they are not making more terrorists. The reason why people continue to support people who try to rattle the government is because they feel that these people are the ones who are fighting for them. They are unwilling to believe that their lives would be any better. Who knows what could happen to that boy in the future if he had a chance to study in a prestigious college? Maybe he could have actually helped other boys like him who has big dreams to achieve them.

But now we will never know.

How can a country actually make fewer criminals, less separatists and less unemployed people? Make promises that they can not keep? Ration food? Promote policies that people do not understand? Or give the military more guns?

If your people are not able to get a job in your own overly protected cities because their level of education or even the quality of their education is below the standards that you set up for any decent position, then how do you expect them to contribute to a faltering economy?

If you allow investors to dictate that your professionally trained people should work jobs that would leave them underemployed, stripped of job security after only six months, then how can anyone expect them to worry about their taxes when they don't have enough money to pay for their bills, send money to their families or even enough to pay for the increasing price of fare, food and lodging?

So when we turn our eyes away from the fact that in the countries where decades-old wars are fought for greed, religious delusions and revenge it is not those who have guns or who have the power to change things are the ones who suffer, then we are enabling this things to continue. When the people of that country have to make do with what little food and peace of mind they can find, there is never going to be any progress.

Why?

Because people are too busy trying to survive.

When I walk along the streets of high-rise condominiums where I am sure lawyers, businessmen and professionals live and see a family of four sleeping outside in front of an abandoned building, I wonder what made this situation acceptable to those who govern my country. Someone bombed the congress last year. This year they spent more than a billion to fix it.

Why?

Because the president of my country had to give a prominent speech about how she would focus on poverty this year WHILE stressing that the country needs the value-added tax to survive. It is because of that the country is tanking. Because the people are too ignorant to know that their own vote was wasted on two-faced men and women who would shake their hands and kiss their sweaty children just so they can get enough power to get bribes and clout.

The Filipinos are not idiots. They are esteemed to be very intelligent by the people they slave for. But what would happen to all the money they earn overseas as laborers and as workers, if the institutions would rather teach their children that they don't deserve to learn from the best because they do not have the bank account to back it up.

I wonder if someday that Muslim kid wouldn't be the one who would have an international reporter at gunpoint. I hope not.

Because maybe then he would be the one giving all of us a lesson we would never forget.

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