Education Is Not The Answer To Poverty

There are countries in this world where the populations are literate, educated, and poverty stricken. Even with college degrees, they cannot escape a life of low wage jobs or chronic unemployment and underemployment. Some work in fast food restaurants, way over qualified but only too happy to at least have a job. Politicians, political commentators, democrat or republican, conservative or liberal like to declare their answer to poverty- better education. If only they looked to those places where education has provided no such thing. There are deep inequities in many societies, where wealth is concentrated in a few hands, and opportunity is limited for the vast majority. Labor has been devalued all over the world. Unskilled workers are seen as highly dispensable, and capital too often seeks those places with the lowest wages and the lowest safety and environmental standards. A simple solution to poverty-education, fails to address these deep structural issues. It also ignores the fact that many very average people are not capable of highly skilled positions, and life seems to be pushing these people aside. It is not like years past in which there were plenty of manufacturing jobs that provided middle class likelihoods to average people that did not excel in school or in mastering a difficult trade. And all over the world, large industrial farming and factory farming has displaced millions of people and condemned them to lives of unemployment or underemployment and poverty(to say nothing of the enormous ecological damage this change has brought). Education as the answer to poverty is a good soundbite. It will lift a few out of poverty, but it is not the answer.