Development workers are increasingly recognizing the inadequacies of formal schooling systems in the South. Formal schooling inevitably depends on massive expenditures for schools, teacher training, and centralized administration, in addition to the continuing drain of government revenues to pay teachers' salaries. Typically, the shortage of revenues to devote to education has ensured a chronic shortfall in the number of teachers relative to ever expanding numbers of pupils at all levels. Inadequately paid teachers cannot afford to devote all of their time to their teaching work, and teacher training based on foreign (often colonial) educational systems means teachers inherit curricula and methods that have little to do with problems faced by students and their families. For these kinds of reasons, formal education systems are unable to provide relevant educational opportunities for many of the rural poor.
From the non-formal education library.
I agree with many of the points--but feel uncomfortable with some of the Leftist language that I fear would result in self-defeating mentalities.
Funny thing is that within the USA, lefties, and for that matter the Right as well, tend to push this type of highly impractical, formal education on the poor as a "ticket to the American dream" (whatever that was supposed to be).
For that matter, it's impractical to the rest of us, SOON TO JOIN THE POOR, as well.
We too need larger numbers of lesser trained health workers to become self-sufficient in health care. Such people are quite capable of treating most common health problems.
To a large degree, that's already the case. Nurses and CNAs perform probably over 90% of health-care. The doctors who ostensibly in charge do relatively little other than give the formal "OK" when the nurse calls to report a problem--that she probably already knows how to take care of anyway, but needs her permission!
A lot of the "big guns" of modern medical technology are geared towards extending lives a few weeks or months past the point of natural viability. My wife just had a patient--82, lived a healthy, active life, but a routine scan stumbled upon an aneurysm. The doctor talked him into surgery. He died on the operating table. In that case, they didn't extend his life, but shortened it, trying to do surgery on a body that was just too old to take it.
There is the romantic who unquestioningly believes in the general effectiveness of traditional remedies, and there is the crusading doctor who sees only superstition in native cures. Both perspectives are partly valid; traditional remedies range from the dramatically effective to the dangerous. The main weakness of traditional medicines has been the failure of its practitioners to question the validity of cures; due to coincidence and the power of suggestion, good and bad remedies are added uncritically to the medical kit of the indigenous healer. Nor has there been sufficient dispassionate review of what is effective, harmless, and dangerous within the drug arsenal of modern medicine.
Again, largely in agreement. A lot of traditional cures are under suspicion simply because they predate "empirical science". The problem is that science STILL is not a motive--drug companies are motivated by PROFITS, not some supposedly "objective" magic called "science".
We have both "diseases" and "cures" that have been lobbied into existence, that are totally fraudulent.
I am quite sure that some ancient cures work for some types of problems, and some don't. People get stuck into a false dichotomy where it's an all-or-nothing deal, when that does not make sense.
