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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is from a third-world country and self-educated, I can't stress enough on providing access to education.

We can create 5,000 jobs today. Simple workers with $10/hour pay. 100 years later and the country won't move. The workers don't understand the power of education, they won't teach well their children and in a third-world country, it's very unlikely they'll get a decent one.

I don't mean by education, an MBA, Ph.D... or all the buzz-words. I mean HN culture, real programmer, self motivation to work and exploit your full potential, mind openness to read and accept the other...

Comparing myself with my other peers, I'm a lot in a better condition and I feel proud of myself, doing something useful instead of spending my time on cafés and playing/watching football.

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The education you're talking about doesn't exist in first world countries either. The education, from elementary school to college, is focused on "teaching" people to be good: citizens (that is, compliant with government demands), consumers, and employees. The highest virtue in schools in first world countries are athletics and popularity. The lowest virtues are learning.

If you create jobs in an area, then people have the economic power to come together and hire teachers and create a school. If an external party, such as government, creates the school, the school will be focused on the agenda of that third party.

Education isn't a commodity like cotton. Pretty much all cotton is the useful as cotton. Much of the education in first world countries is focused on keeping people down, dependent, and unquestioning.

Every decade the schools teach less, and in less detail. It is pretty scary. (I expect to be downvoted because I believe most participants on HN are college students or recent graduates who haven't had enough time out of college to get the perspective that results in these conclusions.)

I have to agree to some extent, though. But let's get back to my point: If I have a child, will I care about his education as if I was "non-educated"?

The difference is huge, I'll buy my son books, magazines, Internet access, good education to learn languages and math, the opportunity to travel... not because I'm a rich dad (may be I won't), but because I think this will evolve his mind and improve his education.

Will a 9-5(blue/white) color worker do that? It's not a question of money but a mentality. That's what I'm talking about. Change people minds and they'll create jobs for themselves.

I've seen no evidence or reason to believe that those who care about their kids will not value education for them. And I have seen evidence that uneducated people do value education. My presumption would be that they value it more.

On the other hand, I find that very few people are willign to create jobs for themselves. Most people are workers. Most people are mainstream and conventional thinkers. I have a sample group of people in the %98 of intelligence and education in the country, and still more than %99 of them are uninterested in striking out on their own... they don't have any desire to be entrepreneurial. Of course, they did go thru the US educational system which pretty much is all about conformism and groupthink, in my opinion.

Give parents the financial resources, via a job, and they will get their kids education.

But how many liberal arts majors do you know? Or other people who went to college, and can't get a job using their degree?

FYI, I don't live in the USA. So my situation here is kind of quite different.

>> And I have seen evidence that uneducated people do value education. My presumption would be that they value it more.

Yes, they do. But they have little knowledge in the right education, don't they? All they know is that they should take their children to schools and colleges and that there children get good grades.

>> Give parents the financial resources, via a job, and they will get their kids education.

Now that's exactly what happened in Tunisia. We have now a load of degrees takers in any field, but do they know how to write properly in English or French? No, they were focusing on grades and success. Parents did spend lot of money on their education, but most of them are failing now and there is a "retour à la source", where children are taking their parents jobs to guarantee a living.

You complain about educated people just wanting a job instead of striking it on their own and in the same post scoff liberal majors because they can't get a job out of college. What is the point?

In many cases education requires far more resources than a large part of the population is able or willing to afford. Also even if uneducated people may seem to value education more, their relationship to it is significantly different.

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