ACTION2015 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS:
Goal #4, #5 and #10 : How Quality Education, Gender Equality and Reduced Inequalities are related
How many times have we complained about our country’s not-so-good educational system? How does this kind of system affect our lives daily? Not many people have thought of the second question.
While many believe that better education equals better economy or better political future, most seem to forget the milestone of those sectors; society, and to be more specific, the people that this society consists of. Therefore, an overall educated group of people would handle the mentioned sectors more efficiently.
Considering that the world already has almost all the knowledge that exists at their fingertips, meaning internet, ebooks, actual books, people to ask for information such as teachers and scholars but also other, more educated people who can even live in a different continent and communicate via internet, all this knowledge is out there and it’s everybody’s duty to learn about different matters.
In today’s world, a world that information is everywhere, there is so little information about how to actually “be good” at the actual world. While someone can be a great Mathematician, they could also be racist. While someone could be amazingly intelligent and create scientific breakthroughs, they can also be terribly discriminating towards who works in their company. Of course their intelligence and education on their objects are flawless… do they really affect the society that positively though?
As the diagram above suggests, and as many must already know, there are many types of intelligence. It is important that a person cultivates as many as they can, it is one though that must be cultivated by all people throughout the world, for the latter to achieve a better social state. As Aristotle said
“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”
And to make things clear, most of scientists do not believe in God! So, not being socially intelligent in 2016's society, thousands of years after Aristotle’s conclusion, must be a boundary to the society’s development.
A society can flourish when all or almost all of its members partake in as many social activities as possible, help each other and live in peace (as the SDG #16 also suggests).
This means all genders, nationalities, religions and social statuses must be a cordial part of this society. Everyone should have the chance to have a say about the world, and of course to live a life having equal rights and chances as everyone else.
It is widely known that not only do gender inequality and further social and racial discriminations still exist, but they are also a main concern of the people being discriminated. While people will still make jokes about how “a woman’s position is in the kitchen” or how “women can’t drive” or how “rape is the victim’s fault because their clothing was revealing, they were asking for it” or even call people of different nationality and religion several names such as “terrorists” and “filthy”, the fact that some neighborhoods throughout the world are considered “ghetto” and dangerous, these people of education still won’t put minimal effort in cultivating the next generations’ mind with the proper social education. A world in which certain (very big) groups of people have trouble walking alone in the street at night, let alone apply for a job or try to better their lifestyle, certainly cannot go too far up the development ladder.
In conclusion, I firmly believe that our world can definitely be one day a world of equality and love. This could take hundreds of years and suffering for many people or more radical changes. These radical changes however don’t threaten the people in charge, and that’s what these people don’t understand, because they are in fear of being overthrown.
