Have I ever said anything about education being wasted on poor kids?
I'm 100% in favor of better education and opportunities for children, why wouldn't I be?
I agree, education is one of things that are needed in order to break the cycle of poverty with kids. Without education, the odds are stacked against them.
Educating kids is like preventative maintenance to protect the future. Unfortunately, if you spend anytime living here and interacting with poorer adult Dominicans, you know that for the majority, preventative maintenance is not part of the vocabulary.
But... Most people on this board do not actually interact with Dominicans or have a clue about their daily lives, needs, issues etc. When they do, it's usually a brief interaction between poor Dominicans that are servicing them in some way. Cleaner, maid, cook, watchyman, whore etc.
When AZB and some others are talking about the poor, they are NOT talking about little 5yr old Juan, but about his Dad or mother, or maybe his adult sister etc.
Do you think paying Juan's parents higher wages or offering to re-educate them will increase Juan's maths scores? Highly unlikely, because it's too late for his parents. He will see a new stereo or shopping bags from Nacional instead of Ola long before benifiting in form of a new text book, educational DVD's etc.
What about Juan's older sister that cannot be bothered to get a job because it's easier to make RD$3,000 for a couple of hours work whoring herself. His sister's income is not going to improve his math's scores, she's too busy buying a new Blackberry or working out what dress to buy.
Have you ever seen the barrio loan system or know how the corner prestomista works? Talk about keep them poor! Yet most poor cannot see how it keeps them poor. They see it as an everyday necessity and handy if they need to buy something new and shiny.
I could go on and on about the stuff I see everyday that enables the cycle of poverty to continue, stuff I personally cannot change and a lot of stuff the poor don't want changed. So I leave the "adult" poor alone, let them deal with their BS and get on with their lives.
I agree in part, pretty much until you get to the "but" part.
Preventative medicine wouldn't be in your vocabulary either, if you were dealing with an open wound at the time. Most of these folks are clearly living on a day by day basis. More than a few posters on this site have romanticized it as carefree living, but it sucks when you're poor, even more so when you're a poor child.
Look, there is no "magic bullet" to solving poverty, especially in a third world country. Further, it is exceedingly difficult to get people who have lived their entire lives in shacks to get out of the poverty mentality. I'd go as far as to say there's a general consensus on this board to that.
I haven't suggested that people who are financially comfortable should sell their belongings, donate the proceeds to the poor, and take up where Mother Teresa left off. Again, being poor is not ennobling, and I for one am grateful that I don't have to live like that.
I AM suggesting that anyone who wants to do more than provide empty rhetoric and isolated observations about drunk waiters should begin where the most long-term good can be accomplished: with the young.
When AZB and others are talking about poverty, they ARE talking about the young. I mean, where do you think "Little Juan's" parents and whoring sister came from? They were kids themselves at one time, and who knows how their lives would have turned out had they been provided the same education as, say, most of us.
Dominican poverty isn't somehow unique so that only long term expats can "get it." The mentality is similar in American and European ghettoes, and in the poorest segments of virtually all countries.
Finally, the axiom "a rising tide lifts all boats" is an axiom for a reason. If we truly want to get Little Juan's sister off her back and on her feet (and I have a feeling some of us may be opposed to that for extraordinarily selfish reasons), the way to do that is to create a true working/middle class that can include her. And that takes an investment of time. Decades, actually.
Better education leads to better skills, which lead to better jobs paying more money, which leads to more consumption and investment, which generates more tax revenue for the state, which can be used to help build hard and soft infrastructure which includes - you guessed it - better education.
