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Comment by mehulashah | Hacker News Reader

He right. I’ve seen poverty in India, but I misunderstood it.

There was a 12 year old kid who guided our boat down the Narmada after we spread my Dads ashes. He was not in school because he wanted money.

I told him I’d pay him double and continue to pay him for his days work, if he’d go back to school during the day and only row boats at night.

He said no. Just give me what you owe me.

He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him. Poverty is not a single static state. It’s a negative feedback loop that requires systemic change to get out of.

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My experience with the kids working in Laos was similar but I have a different interpretation.

Your answer was through the eyes of an adult. 12 year olds dont have concept of money. What is a lot of money or why they need to go to school.

Asking a 12 year old to understand the value of money and education and life is not fair to the child.

What’s actually going on, at least in Laos, is the parents are directing the kids to do these jobs. The kids don’t understand why, but it’s what their mom wants him to do and it makes her happy when they do it.

I think to address these problems, the better solution is to help parents be better parents. Get them jobs, get them educated, get them skills.

It is also that, at 12 years of age, that kid may have had enough of harsh life lessons already, like when he was promised something instead of being rewarded on the spot and later it turned out he was just being tricked. I imagine that something like that may have had a much more direct impact on his OP described decision - that hard earned "street smarts" keeping him grounded in his (undesirable) reality.

I watched a 13-16 year old Lao girl come to that realization in a very upset Facebook story. While I don’t fully understand the context, she was crying and venting that her mother doesn’t love her.

Prior to this fb story, the girl’s mother sold her older 16yo sister to Chinese guy for marriage. And frequently leaves her daughter to sleep on the street, because the girl isn’t able to get home by herself.

Despite all of that, she still felt her mother loved her and just then was when she realized it? I don’t know.

Unfortunately Youre correct, but also it takes years for these kids to process these realities. They’re just isn’t one moment where it’s like “maybe my parents don’t love me” time to change my behavior.

Sometimes, a visible example does that. I know of numerous people in Mumbai who do servant jobs, whose kids have gone to engineering schools and gotten corporate jobs. This sort of story - 1st in my family to go college - needs to be prominent for a parent to want to aspire to that for their kids.

Doesn't work for the absolutely destitute of course.

> He had no hope that education in the government schools would meaningfully change anything for him.

I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.

Everything else was self-taught/learned.

There's an enormous disconnect in educational systems between what skills will get people out of poverty, what skills are great for wealthy navel-gazing students and what skills some bureaucrat decided "everyone" should have (but no one does, because no one pays attention in those classes).

And when people lose faith in the public educational system is when you get dysfunctional societies for the majority of your citizens.

> I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.

I think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.

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