The Role of Education and Skillbuilding As Precursors To Economic Development
Universal public education has some role in preparing youth for basic academic skills and perhaps many trade skills, as well. Apprenticeships clearly build needed trade skills. If modest amounts of cash and land can be combined with a modicum of agricultural skills in a temperate climate, subsistence can give way toward modest societal wealth. As has been mentioned, education for women will allow for reduced family size—an important poverty reduction event in its own right. While all components mentioned above are necessary, the portion of education pertaining to the variety of skills needed to build and maintain the infrastructure of a developing (moving out of poverty) society: building trades; plumbing; electrician; well-drilling; farm and transport mechanical skills (and others) are clearly needed in large numbers of individuals, if the society is to move out of poverty or subsistence. Yet, many well-developed western economies are moving strongly away from the essential apprenticeships and skill training which affords a clear vocational path out of modern urban poverty.
Read more about this topic: Poverty Reduction
Famous quotes containing the words role, education, economic and/or development:
“Certainly parents play a crucial role in the lives of individuals who are intellectually gifted or creatively talented. But this role is not one of active instruction, of teaching children skills,... rather, it is support and encouragement parents give children and the intellectual climate that they create in the home which seem to be the critical factors.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If in the earlier part of the century, middle-class children suffered from overattentive mothers, from being “mother’s only accomplishment,” today’s children may suffer from an underestimation of their needs. Our idea of what a child needs in each case reflects what parents need. The child’s needs are thus a cultural football in an economic and marital game.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)