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An initiative of Free The Children | |||
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An initiative of Free The Children | |||
Understanding the world around you is the first step towards making positive change. From clean water, to child labour, you can explore important topics with Issue Backgrounders.
Me to We Trips visited the rural village of Wu Jia Zhuang, China, where the community and North American youth volunteers had built a new school some months before. The students were waiting, dressed in their best clothes, big smiles on their faces and waving colourful flags, singing in Mandarin, "Welcome, warm welcome." The students of Wu Jia Zhuang school put on a big ceremony for their guests.
"It's no wonder they put so much energy and joy into greeting us," writes Garry Norman, a Me to We Trip facilitator. "They are so proud of their school; it's the centre of their village."
The old school had been falling apart. Its poorly lit rooms were half the size of Western elementary school classrooms. Each room had as many as 60 kids crammed inside. Imagine trying to pay attention, study or get the teacher's help in a school like this.
The new school gives students the space and atmosphere for a good education. Funds raised by their North American peers help to train teachers and supply classrooms. Sunnili, the first student to graduate from Wu Jia Zhuang school, is now in high school getting excellent grades in all her classes. She plans to go to university to become a scientist. As long as they have pencils in their hands and a teacher to guide them, the kids in Wu Jia Zhuang will have the chance to escape poverty and realize their dreams.
In North America, we believe that all children—boy or girl, rich or poor, white, black, brown, yellow, red or blue—have the right to education. So we set up systems to work toward this goal. For example, our taxes pay for the building of public schools as well as materials like white boards and desks. If distance presents a challenge, we roll out the big yellow buses. If children are hungry because of poverty, we have lunch programs to provide the nutrition that is essential for learning.
Despite this, we still fail to meet every child's needs. Poverty affects attendance and contributes to drop-out rates. Statistics suggest that our literacy rates are lower than they should be. But still, almost 100 percent of all North American school-age children are in school. This is a far different picture from the developing countries, where millions of children are denied their basic right to an education.
Maybe you've heard people talk about the "cycle of poverty." What this means is that if your parents are very poor, you won't get enough healthy food, resulting in undernourishment and illness. Undernourishment and illness then keep you out of school and make it difficult to study and learn. Without education, you can't get a good job. And so the cycle continues.
Although all the parts of this cycle are connected, education is uniquely powerful because it is long-lasting, comprehensive and empowering. Giving knowledge is very different from giving a bowl of rice or a vaccine. The rice and vaccine are important, but not sustainable. As the old saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach him how to fish, he'll feed himself for a lifetime.
Education is about gathering knowledge and skills. It affects the amount of power that a person has to determine his or her own future. An "educated" person is often described as literate, able to think critically about the world and equipped to contribute to his or her community.
When children are in school, they learn about important health issues, information that can protect them from deadly diseases. Education is also proven to reduce the chance of death for mothers and children during and around pregnancy. Educated women are more likely to have children that survive and are healthy, because educated women have learned the importance of nutrition and proper health care. Educated mothers are also more likely to send their children to school.
In order to prevent being exploited, and to have the chance at a future that is healthy and productive, children need to understand what's going on around them well enough to choose a safe and prosperous path. Education gives them this opportunity.
There are many reasons why school attendance isn't higher in many countries. Often the situation is very complicated and many factors are simultaneously at work. In families living in extreme poverty, children tend to work as labourers for as many as 12 hours a day. To make things harder, many countries have tuition fees and school uniform requirements that make school prohibitively expensive.
In countries torn apart by war, children are often forced to trade their pens for guns. Around the world today, more than 300,000 (World Bank) children are fighting as child soldiers. Children need the ability to attend school where they can learn successful conflict resolution skills. If enough children learn peace-building like this, perhaps whole societies will be able to prevent warfare and violence from the ground up.
Illness and diseases like malaria, diarrhoea and tuberculosis prevent children from being physically able to attend school. If children aren't suffering with these health issues, they may be forced to stay home in order to care for younger siblings after losing their parents to AIDS.
Girls usually have an even harder time with education than boys. About 1 in 10 school-aged girls in Africa drop out once they reach puberty because they don't have clean or private washrooms to use at school. In many places around the world, girls are forced to leave school at an early age in order to enter into marriage. Even the daily chore of collecting safe drinking water takes away from time that girls could spend in the classroom, as they often have to walk for hours just to find clean water.
UNICEF, "On Global Action Week on Education, millions of children still not in school." http://www.unicef.org/media/media_39441.html
World Bank Group, Child Soldiers. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALDEVE
Make Poverty History, "Cancel the Debt." http://www.makepovertyhistory.ca/e/aim2.html
United Nations Human Development Report 2006". http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf
UN, Children and Armed Conflict. http://www.un.org/children/conflict/english/conflicts.html
United Nations, "Only With Your Voice - Millennium Development Goals Youth Action Guide." http://tig.phpwebhosting.com/themes/mdg/action_guide_en.pdf
UNICEF, "Education: The big picture." http://www.unicef.ca/portal/SmartDefault.aspx?at=1282
UNICEF, "Basic Education and Gender Equality." http://www.unicef.org/girlseducation/index_bigpicture.html
The Millennium Project: Commissioned by the UN Secretary General and supported by the UN Development Group, "Fast Facts: The Faces of Poverty." http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/resources/fastfacts_e.htm
International Labour Organization, "The end of child labour: Within reach", 2006.
 
Youth leading global change is the movement of our time. We Day is the manifestation of this movement. 
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Free The Children believes in a world where all young people are free to achieve their fullest potential as agents of change.
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Me to We is an innovative social enterprise that provides people with better choices for a better world.
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