Setting The Stage

What I learned: The lesson begins by describing and discussing the amount of countries that lack a sufficient education for the bulk of their people. It talks about how those countries are possibly attempting to improve the amount of people that are educated, however. Countries who have more years of schooling are richer. Acquiring an education in itself isn't what is valuable. What's valuable is not that education causes growth, its that growth causes education. A "supply-driven" education is then discussed. It is a pro that if one is educated and can figure out technology, then there is a spillover effect and it will spread. A con is that supply-driven educations allow for growth in factors like capital, labor, and human capital. In turn these sound good, but the statistical evidence reveals that the results from the supply-driven education are honestly not that important. ONE country is then focused on in attempt to fully determine if there is a benefit from education. It's determined that in order for education to be a successful factor in LDC's, everything must be done properly. You can't just build a bunch of schools. Many more aspects must be brought into it, discussed, resolved, etc. The teachers, the location, the infrastructure, the successful incentives to assure that the schools will be attended, so much more are crucial factors in implementing educational systems in lesser developed and poverty ridden nations.

How it relates: This can slightly relate to the paper that I wrote about Sudan for the World Food Prize, but not as heavily. Education was not a large focus within my paper, because my topic was government and food security. Education is a very limited and rare factor within Sudan. So many other things are also in shambles within the country (government, health care, malnutrition, etc.) that with what was discussed in this lesson, that it would take such careful planning to get right, I think education in order to be effective would be less of a worry. Unless the education came in forms of educating farmers, or educating about health care and ways to improve the quality of life, formal education such as primary and secondary school I wouldn't see as being that necessary at this point.