Viewpoint: Polan Lacki

The failure of a rural and urban education, which offers “the circus before food”

An article by Polan Lacki
Translation by Sunny Maroo

In the countries of Latin American, a growing percentage of the young people, from both urban and rural areas, are now managing to finish the basic education, up to middle or secondary education.

Unfortunately, this success is more appearance than reality.

To be more specific; it is producing disappointing results.  These youngsters, who are now more studious with broad horizon of dreams and ambition, feel frustrated if not cheated. After having studied those long 11 years, during which they were given the illusion that their effort would offer them a future with opportunity and prosperity, they then discover that they are not good enough to get even a regular job; they withdraw from the educational system without possessing the “qualities” that the employers require in a good employee.

This occurs because the useful knowledge, necessary attitudes or the attitudes needed to be good employees are not proportional in both the rural and urban educational systems. They are not even taught how to prepare themselves to be good citizens or good parents who would educate, guide, feed their children and look-after their health.

Speaking without euphemisms; excluding the first 3 years (in which they learnt to read, write, do basic mathematics and learn the metric system), practically all the other knowledge gained is useless in improving their chances at work and in their personal life with the family and the community.

In the remaining 8 years of their education, the few things that could be useful to them are taught in such an overly theoretical, abstract, fragmented way, disconnecting them from life and work, that they are made virtually useless.

So, why study these extra 8 years?

Let’s be objective and realistic: How is it useful or applicable in everyday life to learn logarithms, determinants, analytical geometry, square root and cubic root, or the memorizing of the history of Cleopatra or the Empress of Byzantium, the Pharaohs, the Pyramids of Egypt, the history of Mesopotamia and the height of the Rocky Mountains?

Some defenders of this conservative educational system confirm that these contents are necessary for the students to develop creativity, genius, critical and investigative skills, the ability to take the initiative, and to give them an integrated development.

Personally, I think that there are other more intelligent and more productive ways to reach the same objectives.

Contents much closer - in both space and time - to the students’ everyday realities would be much more efficient in developing their latent potential. The ability to establish relationships between cause and effect, for example, would allow them to avoid repeating mistakes made in the past.

Other theorists say that it is necessary to keep these contents  in order to “democratize” the opportunities of access to universities, ignoring the fact that in the countries of Latin America, just 5 or 10% of the youth have this privilege. In these conditions, it is not logical or right to punish and bore the other 90 or 95% who won't reach university, by making them study 8 years of subjects that are excessively theoretical, abstract, distant, unusable, and not to mention, useless.

In the contemporary world those with an education have more immediate and concrete interests and motivations. Their main aspiration is to get employment that is well remunerated to access the goods and services that the modern world offers, and also to make the family happy and prosperous. Therefore, a realistic education should be orientated to meeting the wants and needs as prioritized by the majority of the population. It shouldn’t consist of a growing quantity of information presented without context, which is irrelevant and can’t be used in solving everyday problems.

The reality is that, after finishing or leaving basic or middle school, the great majority of those educated in rural schools;

A. Dedicate themselves as rural producers or employees to farming. They fail in this, among other reasons, due to the rural school teaching them the history of the Roman Imperial and French Renaissance instead of teaching them to produce, administer rural estates and commercialize the harvest with more efficiency - ignoring that this is the first requirement to allow them to increase their income and thanks to this, survive with dignity in the rural environment.

B. After the failure of their rural activities, these ex-farmers and their children move to the city where they become civil constructors, bricklayers, painters or carpenters, drivers, removal men or car guards, police or watchmen, cooks, or waiters/waitresses, street vendors, house or office cleaners, street cleaners, bin men, clerks, private or public company workers etc. These urban activities employ the most manual laborers in the modern world.

As stated above: not only did the school curriculum not respond the needs of the parents, but now, the material taught in the urban schools does not fulfill the needs of their children today.

For the majority of people to be successful, more efficient and more productive, they need knowledge that is useful and applicable. This will improve their performance in the most common jobs mentioned above; and in particular allow them to carry out the other activities that are more highly valued by society and by the work market.

The pseudo-cultural and intellectual varnish, often found in our obsolete curriculums, doesn’t contribute to the attainment of any of these objectives - employers are not interested in knowing if their employees know the biographies of Montesquieu, Robespierre or Richelieu.

The abyss between what is taught through the educational system, and the young people being educated, is fundamentally unacceptable.

This dysfunctional education is so detrimental to our young people, to the production sector and to the future of our nations that we cannot keep accepting “specialists’” theories, justifications and scholarly works insisting on maintaining the superfluous in the curriculum instead of replacing it with the essentials.

Society should demand courageous, immediate and radical transformation of the educational system. The cosmetic means adopted for this system in recent decades, have shown to be badly prioritized/orientated, inefficient and ineffective.

The people living in the city, those who are financing this anachronism in the educational system with their taxes, and paying for the consequences of the poor quality of education, have all the right to demand this. The education system has the obligation to accept this demand.

The educational content that most people will never use will have to be removed from the curriculum. It should be replaced with knowledge that has a greater likelihood of being used by those educated, for the rest of their lives. It is necessary to offer an education that helps them help themselves to transform their adverse reality, correct their inefficiencies and solve their everyday problems.

The growing multitudes of unemployed/underemployed, poor and miserable who don’t have money to put a decent roof over their heads, to buy food and medicine, or to send their children to school, the doctor and the dentist, need foremost a useful education. It is this which will allow them to get a job with reasonable wages, with which they could satisfy the basic needs of the family.

The multitudes of “badly-educated” by our schools are not interested in the height of Everest or the length of the River Nile, or about the battles that occurred in Circus Maximus or the Coliseum in Rome.

After acquiring the knowledge needed to be more productive employees, better citizens and better parents, they may indeed look for opportunities and knowledge sources to satisfy their curiosity, intellectual and cultural interests. These opportunities and knowledge sources need not of necessity be found through the formal educational system.

It’s understandable that those of society, who are privileged by having access to food, want to go to the circus. However, the priority for the great majority, those are not privileged - the poor, the suffering and the abandoned - is different, they want food first and then the circus.