by PinayWriter

Created on: July 31, 2008   Last Updated: August 01, 2008

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

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