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Comment by kelipso | Hacker News Reader

I think so. These girls still live with their family, it’s not like they’re in some cordoned off area where marriage if forbidden. It’s just a few hours of school every weekday.

Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.

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I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something.

But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.

Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.

I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably".

Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.

But if the issue fixed as "make it possible for girls to stay home until older" and paying the families would have had the same result as schooling, it's important to know that.

Education can be a good and still not be the fundamental cause (just like going to school where they provide breakfast and lunch may be good, but the reason you grow stronger isn't the classes, it's the food).

Non-obvious for this guy me!

I'm ok with hearing "it's not this it's that" if there's an overcooked "it's not that it's this" narrative nearby, and there is: education was (and is!) aggressively pushed as a cure-all for job displacement and other ills by people doing labor arbitrage in the united states, it eventually turned out that wet sidewalks did not cause rain, and now there are a bunch of underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans and on the other side of the trade a bunch of rich boomers+billionaires whose brokerage accounts depend on continuing the hustle. Given that we have seen the exact education-cures-all narrative exploited to disastrous consequence in the United States, we should absolutely be asking the question "is education the active ingredient" to avoid exporting the same stupid mistake to others.

America has fairly low unemployment rates. Yes, schools are expensive and educational debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. But, you know, unemployment rates are the worst for people with low or no education.

I didn't say the problem in America was high unemployment, I said the problem was:

> underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans

Please respond to the correct argument I made, not the incorrect argument you wish I had made.

> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.

The way this is phrased makes it seem like the children are making the choice to marry.

Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women.

That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.

I'm here to make somebody feel old: The Graduate (1967) came out almost 60 years ago. I wonder how long the norms portrayed in that film persisted or have evolved since then.

They nailed the plastics thing.

Can offer one read:

> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.

“Basically if you are a kid your friends/family will want you to get married if your friends/family notice you are unemployed/not in school/etc.”

(The desires of the kid were not referenced.)

I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation.

the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.

Or, potentially, you have less time to marry (among other things) when you go to school?

No, it's not a scheduling conflict. A child getting married is entirely about if the parents choose to force that child to be married or not. They were less motivated to marry the child, if the child was going to school, because an education is an alternative path to gain moneys, which is the parents primary motive. It's interesting how disgusting greed like this is wrapped in words, like "culture" that try to make it ok. It's a repugnant behavior, which is why there was effort to correct it, and success in that is why we're reading about it here.

Their motive is to provide financial and social security for their child so that their child won’t be out in the streets if something happens to them. That’s not greed. That’s normal basic universal care for offspring that all humans have.

By forced marriage and rape. Great deal! And no, it's not just for the sake of the child, in most cases. I implore you to look into this more.

Dramatics and stretching of definitions will only weaken your case.

Again, I strongly implore you to look into this more [1][2]. There are no dramatics or stretching of definitions here (unless you're one that thinks children can consent to sex). There's a reason this effort took place, and why its success is being celebrated.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11545136/

[2] https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/en/learning-resources/child-m...

Lol. Dramatics and accusation and you expect people to take you seriously… All this does is pour serious doubt over the veracity of the links you posted.

You call it greed but in a lot of these places it's necessity. Now that necessity might partially be the result of other people's greed but that's a whole other conversation about poverty.

A parent's primary motive is not to gain money, much less to gain money by exploiting their child.

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