Change the Way the World Learns
Growing up in the United States — or anywhere in the so-called “developed world” for that matter — can be disorienting. We hear about people trying to end world hunger, fight off terrorism, and solve other great problems that are currently in our world, but we rarely see any of these things up close.
I had a unique experience — well, me and the other 1 million Iranian-Americans. I was raised with parents who lived through the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. My mother told me stories of bombings in her neighborhood, so close that she could see bombs landing on her neighbor’s homes. I first witnessed poverty on a trip to Iran. I was seven years old and it was the first time I remember seeing a poor boy my age, all alone on the street, begging for food.
As I got older, these images stuck in my head and these terrible truths I’d always heard about began to crystallize. I sought comfort in studying solutions that others have put in place, which have been chipping away at these problems for years. It made me happy to learn that they were, in large part, working. The world is becoming a better place year after year (for a great book on this, I’d recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling — I recommend this book to everyone).
Although an impressive and well-meaning group is already tackling the world’s issues, it frustrates me to see so many still suffering in the face of slow progress. By no means am I discounting the great work that is being done, but I constantly wonder if we can be doing more. I looked deeper. I looked into societies that had fewer extreme problems than others — I compared the developed to the non-developed world — looking for general trends.
There are lots of popular metrics that researchers look at including infant mortality rate, life expectancy, and others, but these are simply effects. When I looked for causes, I found things like terrorism, war, and poor access to healthcare. But these are not root causes, they are just other effects. The more I looked, the more I found that the one true cause of every single problem in the world is poor education.
The one true cause of every single problem in the world is poor education
This may seem like an extreme statement, but I believe it. I believe that every single problem in the world is caused by a person, a group of people, or a society that is inadequately educated. If we work backward from this claim, we come to an interesting learning: All problems in the world can be solved by better education.
“Better education” means many things. I don’t mean “better access to education.” I don’t mean “better quality education.” I don’t even mean “better cost of education.” I mean all of the above. I mean that we must fundamentally change the way that we think about education to solve all of its problems, and in doing so we will solve all of our problems.
