Education is Kids’ Passport to Real Prosperity (614 hits)
One of those ubiquitous television commercials seeking contributions to poor children in third world countries informed viewers that the featured needy child - in this case, a little boy from a decrepit African village - can go to school if the money comes through.
For such children, going to school is a treat - a break from the humdrum of life among the collection of huts and shacks, where disease waits in the water, and the only thing the ground produces is frustration, choking dust and what passes for a floor. School is order and learning and stimulation and entertainment and fellowship.
What it does not necessarily offer is an escape hatch from the life these kids and their families have always known. In the third world, opportunity does not always follow preparation.
It does not always follow here either, but in the United States, there is an equation that offers hope for breaking the poverty cycle that does not exist everywhere. Though, again, it does not come with a guarantee, the equation goes something like this:
If you pay attention from the first day of algebra and biology and English and history, you can do the work.
If you do the work, you can do well and pass the classes.
If you do well and pass the classes, you can graduate - not only on time, but maybe high in your class, perhaps even with honors.
If you graduate, especially with special recognition, you can go to college.
If you go to college, pay attention from the first day, do the work, do well and pass the classes, you can earn a degree.
If you have a degree, you can qualify for an array of jobs that will pay you decently and regularly and provide benefits like health care and sick leave and a retirement savings fund. It will even pay you to take a vacation.
If you get that job, show up when you're supposed to, do your work, get along with your coworkers, keep your nose clean and make it your business to keep learning, you can expect to keep the job until you're old and gray, or even move up the ladder, earning more money and higher benefits.
What this means is that you will be able to give your children all that they need and much of what they want and will not know the pain of their deprivation because, way back when, you did what you had to do.
And while things may still be tough sometimes and unfair sometimes, your amble mind will be trained to cope with whatever comes your way. You will know, for example, that if you write an intelligent letter, explaining your situation and demonstrating your sense of responsibility about the debt you cannot now pay, the company is much more likely to work with you in hammering out some kind of tenable arrangement and much less likely to drive you off a bridge. Moreover, because you treated yourself to the banquet of knowledge and information out there, you know exactly how to write that letter.
Summer is going swiftly, once again. Another school year is just weeks - in some cases, mere days - away. It's time to remind our children that another new beginning is in the offing. No matter how poorly they've performed before, the coming term is an opportunity to turn not only their academic records around, but the course of their lives.
It is a slow grind to success, but a stable one. At the end of it, there is a bounty of opportunity that can end heirloom poverty and need.
