"The story appealed to me because of the way it fits into the larger picture. Increasingly I've become convinced that education is an effective intervention partly because of the way it has an impact on health, on population growth, on bringing women into the mainstream, and even on reducing social conflict."
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times,
Nov. 5, 2011
Unpredictable coincidences intrigue me, especially when they nudge me to explore an unfamiliar path.
The first nudge last week was the gentler of two. In response to one of my columns, it was an email from a reader I'll call Rob who expressed his concerns about private companies that exploit resources "and leave nothing for future generations, other than a sea of toxic waste. . . ."
Having seen the documentary Gasland about resource development in the United States, he had become worried about the cumulative effect of the environmental assaults underway in British Columbia.
Rob teaches in a Lower Mainland school, so in order to protect the integrity of his position, I agreed to his request that I not mention his name.
His brief note ended with the question: "What can we do to stop this insanity?"
My short answer was that I had no solutions to offer that could be implemented fast enough to halt the tsunami.
Reluctant to abandon the challenge, however, my reply also suggested that, by the very nature of their work, teachers might be in the best position of all to influence a change for the better - provided those influences remain apolitical in the classroom.
Although sincere and on the right track, the solution I offered sounded insufficient. Even though I am convinced that given the unbiased truth, the unvarnished facts, children will invariably come to the right conclusions, I felt the effort required would be discouraging and too much for any one person or group to tackle.
I should have known better, because as anthropologist Margaret Mead would have chastised me, "We are continually faced with great opportunities that are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems."
Sure enough, less than 10 hours later, the second nudge hit me between the eyes when a friend sent me a link to the inspiring Nicholas Kristof article about 47-year-old John Wood, a former Microsoft marketing director, whose charity, Room to Read, has opened no less than 12,000 libraries and 1,500 schools worldwide.
But Wood did not stop there and, as Kristof explains in his blog post Fighting for Literacy, Library by Library, the program now supports more than 13,500 girls in poor countries around the world who otherwise might not have been able to attend school.
Kristoff reports that "The cost per girl for (Wood's) program is US$250 annually."
That set me to thinking about our own situation in Canada. Over the past 10 years or so, taxpayers on the North Shore have spent more than $100 million for library-anchored projects to serve a combined community of fewer than 200,000 people - a situation that has been replicated many times over throughout the province. In Wood's terms, those North Shore public dollars could have supported four years of education for 100,000 impoverished students.
Am I suggesting we do without libraries, recreation facilities and the other amenities we have become accustomed to in our Canadian way of living? Not at all.
What I do suggest, though, is that we need to become more Wood-like.
The conditions for many hundreds of children right here in British Columbia are not much better than those in Nepal, Vietnam and dozens of other poor countries around the world. In fact, when we factor in the additional problems caused by alcohol and drug addiction, the situation for many of our remote small communities may well be worse. As our Representative for Children and Youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond can confirm, that is especially so for children who live on poverty-stricken First Nations reserves.
Surely, it would be in everyone's best interest for us to set about rectifying the situation once and for all.
Wood's libraries and schools are not being built in architecturally-designed centres. They are often housed in a single room, and judging by the cheers of local children Kristof witnessed at the opening of a library in the Vietnamese village he visited, they may be all the more loved as a result.
So there it is in a nutshell, Rob. If we can agree with Mead that "when we save our children, we save ourselves," and with Kristof that "education is the most effective escalator out of poverty," we would be well on the way to finding the multi-part answer to your question.
There is no way to explain why, within a few hours of one another, a British Columbian teacher I had never met and a friend in Manitoba each decided to send me email signposts that, together, pointed me in the right direction.
Is anyone game to lead the way?
rimco@shaw.ca
