NationStates Jolt Archive

I hear so many people say that education is the way to get everyone out of poverty. To a point, I agree. But keep in mind that somebody still is going to have to sweep up at night (or flip hamburgers), regardless if everyone earned (was given) a PhD. Seriously, and without regard to any particular group of people, if everyone in the country managed to get a Doctors degree in something, would that solve poverty? Or would there be some other way to determine who among the people are being hired are the best candidates, and the remainder get passed over.

Lets face it, getting a good education on your own is a good way to determine if a person has the talents/skills/ability/stick-to-it-ness to succeed anywhere. Now certainly, there are individuals who are in bad situations who due to environment were less likely to achieve an education, but is that number anywhere near equal to the number of enpoverished out there?

Or would there be some other way to determine who among the people are being hired are the best candidates, and the remainder get passed over.
sure, it would be who works the hardest and does the best job, that's what it should be now, but sadly it's not most of the time.

sure, it would be who works the hardest and does the best job, that's what it should be now, but sadly it's not most of the time.

What prevents it from being so, then? Is it real, or perceived? For instance, if everyone else applying for the job is wearing a shirt, tie, and slacks, and some guy (who would work harder and better than anyone else, if you just gave him a chance) came in wearing a rock t-shirt, piercings, and tatoos, and they don't even consider him, (and probably wouldnt consider him at a job weilding a broom) - should he feel let down and abused by the system?

I hear so many people say that education is the way to get everyone out of poverty. To a point, I agree. But keep in mind that somebody still is going to have to sweep up at night (or flip hamburgers), regardless if everyone earned (was given) a PhD. Seriously, and without regard to any particular group of people, if everyone in the country managed to get a Doctors degree in something, would that solve poverty? Or would there be some other way to determine who among the people are being hired are the best candidates, and the remainder get passed over.

Lets face it, getting a good education on your own is a good way to determine if a person has the talents/skills/ability/stick-to-it-ness to succeed anywhere. Now certainly, there are individuals who are in bad situations who due to environment were less likely to achieve an education, but is that number anywhere near equal to the number of enpoverished out there?
If you think that a university education is the only kind of education that means anything, then you are quite wrong. Trades, tech school, military education and the like are all great ways to learn something. Plus it serves the need for a diverse workforce.

I agree with Myrm...but also want to point out that education for education's sake is a valid principle as well.

If you think that a university education is the only kind of education that means anything, then you are quite wrong. Trades, tech school, military education and the like are all great ways to learn something. Plus it serves the need for a diverse workforce.

I completely agree with you. The question I am asking is, will education of any kind fix poverty?

What prevents it from being so, then? Is it real, or perceived? For instance, if everyone else applying for the job is wearing a shirt, tie, and slacks, and some guy (who would work harder and better than anyone else, if you just gave him a chance) came in wearing a rock t-shirt, piercings, and tatoos, and they don't even consider him, (and probably wouldnt consider him at a job weilding a broom) - should he feel let down and abused by the system?
I feel let down by the system every single time I have to deal with an idiot behind a desk who has an associates degree when I know that there are people who could do the work, do it better, appreciate having a job more so they work harder, and they are turned down. :( btw, I did get a job when I was 14 with green hair and a peirced tongue, I said "give me a chance" and he did, I worked my butt off, got a raise and then I had to deal with the other people there who "had been ther longer" so they thought they "deserved" to make more money than me, nevermind that we made almost the same hourly wage (they made $2.00 an hour and I made $2.25) but that the bulk of my money came from tips (I ended up making about $75 for a 4 hour shift to thier $12.00) :rolleyes:

I completely agree with you. The question I am asking is, will education of any kind fix poverty?
Not in the current system, because some people are permanently locked out of means to make money, for example being born into poverty in the global South.

Also the way we judge success is screwed up. Money does not equal success. Quality of life = success.

I completely agree with you. The question I am asking is, will education of any kind fix poverty? If people had a proper education then yes. It might be possible to get some of the people out, not all, not even a majority, but some.

I feel let down by the system every single time I have to deal with an idiot behind a desk who has an associates degree when I know that there are people who could do the work, do it better, appreciate having a job more so they work harder, and they are turned down. :( btw, I did get a job when I was 14 with green hair and a peirced tongue, I said "give me a chance" and he did, I worked my butt off, got a raise and then I had to deal with the other people there who "had been ther longer" so they thought they "deserved" to make more money than me, nevermind that we made almost the same hourly wage (they made $2.00 an hour and I made $2.25) but that the bulk of my money came from tips (I ended up making about $75 for a 4 hour shift to thier $12.00) :rolleyes:

Sure, I think that everyone should be given a chance at a low level. But what if you are applying for a manager's job? Or a very technical job? These types of jobs require the highest scrutiny, and the most qualified/most able/most suitable (probably a combination of the three) will win the slot. Getting a job is a competition, or at least that is what my folks taught me.

Not in the current system, because some people are permanently locked out of means to make money, for example being born into poverty in the global South.

Also the way we judge success is screwed up. Money does not equal success. Quality of life = success.

So an old man sitting on a back porch with one tooth and an ear to ear grin, a harmonica in one hand, and a jug of white lightning in the other is not to be considered empoverished? He is as happy as can be, and wouldn't change a thing even though he doesnt have but a few cents to his name (grows his own potatoes and vegetables, and raises some chickens and has a couple of goats)

So does this mean that only people with their hands out waiting for some coin are empoverished?

There is more than one form of education.

Vocational training is one way into a profession, a vocational degree is another. The people who really get shafted are those with a degree or other form of education in a non-job-specific area, eg management or humanities. If you are one of these people, it is particularly important to have a wisdom and aptitude that sets you apart from everyone else, otherwise there is a real danger of ending up no better off than someone with no education.

There is more than one form of education.

Vocational training is one way into a profession, a vocational degree is another. The people who really get shafted are those with a degree or other form of education in a non-job-specific area, eg management or humanities. If you are one of these people, it is particularly important to have a wisdom and aptitude that sets you apart from everyone else, otherwise there is a real danger of ending up no better off than someone with no education.

But listen to any polititian, and you will hear that education will solve poverty. Hell, if you listen to any polititian, education will solve nearly anything... I just don't understand. Doesn't attitude and work ethic have anything to do with it? But then again, if you had attitude and work ethic...

A long time ago (seems like another age entirely) I saw a Labor Day billboard sponsored by the AFL-CIO that said simply, "There is Pride in All Kinds of Work."

While it's good to ponder the keys to ending poverty (and I'll just say, education couldn't hurt the cause), I wonder why you're all just assuming -- and accepting -- that the person who sweeps up at night is necessarily going to be poor and uneducated.

Do you realize that this assumption is an elitist one? The person who sweeps up at night has a job and works damned hard at it (I've seen them do it). Why shouldn't that work pay a living wage? Why should that person be poor -- i.e. living below the poverty line -- when they work so hard and so regularly?

And while we're at it, why shouldn't the person who sweeps up at night for a living be able to read Shakespeare on his way to and from work?

If education can make a dent in poverty, maybe it will be by attacking the elitist social assumptions about how much this or that job is worth to society and, by extension, how much the people who do it are worth.

Personally, I think the people who sweep up corporate offices are far more important and valuable (and get more done for their paychecks) than the CEOs who run those corporations.

Peak Oil will see us all reduced to poverty. Save your money, don’t go to college. Use it to prepare for the third world conditions of the near future.

But listen to any polititian, and you will hear that education will solve poverty. Hell, if you listen to any polititian, education will solve nearly anything... I just don't understand. Doesn't attitude and work ethic have anything to do with it? But then again, if you had attitude and work ethic...
They have to say that stuff. I got an engineering degree and walked straight into a job of my choice upon graduation. Took me a month of looking to get four decent offers.

A friend of mine had an equally strong work ethic, but she did a history degree. It took her a year to find decent work, during which time she worked in a bar alongside people who left school in undistinguished fashion.

Another friend did physics, but drifts from one temping job to another, because he isn't quite ready to assume responsibility yet.

Education is not guaranteed to solve anyone's problems. You need the right education for a start, you need the right economic conditions in your chosen sector, you need a certain strength of character, and even then you may find you benefit from a lucky break. There is no government-funded 'w1n' button, it's a complicated world out there.

Or to put it another way, education opens a door.

But it doesn't give you a map for the maze behind the door, and there are traps. :eek:

Peak Oil will see us all reduced to poverty. Save your money, don’t go to college. Use it to prepare for the third world conditions of the near future.
A good education would help with that. :D

A long time ago (seems like another age entirely) I saw a Labor Day billboard sponsored by the AFL-CIO that said simply, "There is Pride in All Kinds of Work."

While it's good to ponder the keys to ending poverty (and I'll just say, education couldn't hurt the cause), I wonder why you're all just assuming -- and accepting -- that the person who sweeps up at night is necessarily going to be poor and uneducated.

Do you realize that this assumption is an elitist one? The person who sweeps up at night has a job and works damned hard at it (I've seen them do it). Why shouldn't that work pay a living wage? Why should that person be poor -- i.e. living below the poverty line -- when they work so hard and so regularly?

And while we're at it, why shouldn't the person who sweeps up at night for a living be able to read Shakespeare on his way to and from work?

If education can make a dent in poverty, maybe it will be by attacking the elitist social assumptions about how much this or that job is worth to society and, by extension, how much the people who do it are worth.

Personally, I think the people who sweep up corporate offices are far more important and valuable (and get more done for their paychecks) than the CEOs who run those corporations.


I work in a company, near the payroll department, and if we can find someone who will sweep up at night for seven bucks and hour, we'll hire them. And believe me, if you pay that, the candidates will show up. A company is in business to make money, and if they can find the widget that they need to make their product for fifty percent cheaper if they go with brand X, so long as their sales do not suffer, they will go with brand X. Why can't the same be said about labor? So long as the floor gets swept, who cares? Let's go with the guy who will do it for seven bucks an hour...

There is no way you are going to stop that, unless you force companies to give more to their base employees.. but then the cost to make the product will go up so high, across the market, that everyone will have to have the same percentage of wage increase to have the same buying power for their wages, and boom -- inflation strikes, and the same percent of the guy sweeping up's paycheck will buy the same amount of milk, eggs, and bread as it did last week. -- and the value of the dollar falls again

Peak Oil will see us all reduced to poverty. Save your money, don’t go to college. Use it to prepare for the third world conditions of the near future.
Thermodynamics and sports physiology are your friends. Also, I should think medics will prove handy. :D

IMHO, one of the traps that we fall into, in the US, when talking about education is college itself. Back in the day -- not all that long ago, actually -- American grade schools and high schools gave much better basic and liberal arts educations than they do now. I'm not kidding -- I see material on college course descriptions now that I covered in 9th grade in the 1970s. In those days, you could get a very good job with a high school diploma. College was for more intense training -- like law, medecine, engineering, academics, etc. -- or just for the love of it. But a high school grad could easily manage an office or an independent business, do higher math, read literature, understand politics and history, etc.

Education may or may not get people out of poverty, but I wonder if the lack of it is what gets people into poverty.

I say we can't use education to battle poverty until we reform education.

I work in a company, near the payroll department, and if we can find someone who will sweep up at night for seven bucks and hour, we'll hire them. And believe me, if you pay that, the candidates will show up. A company is in business to make money, and if they can find the widget that they need to make their product for fifty percent cheaper if they go with brand X, so long as their sales do not suffer, they will go with brand X. Why can't the same be said about labor? So long as the floor gets swept, who cares? Let's go with the guy who will do it for seven bucks an hour...

There is no way you are going to stop that, unless you force companies to give more to their base employees.. but then the cost to make the product will go up so high, across the market, that everyone will have to have the same percentage of wage increase to have the same buying power for their wages, and boom -- inflation strikes, and the same percent of the guy sweeping up's paycheck will buy the same amount of milk, eggs, and bread as it did last week. -- and the value of the dollar falls again
The joke's on you (your company). You're already paying in the upper range for office cleaners. The federal minimum wage is much less ($5.15/hour), and companies that use illegal workers pay less than that. So you see? You're already part of the solution, and I presume your company is not bankrupt.

Do you also see that education has nothing to do with this? It's perfectly possible for an unsuccessful or unlucky college grad to end up working for your $7. So I guess the answer to your question of whether education can end poverty would be no.

I can't speak for other countries, but poverty in the US is really neither a class issue nor an economic inevitability. It's true that there will always be people who do less well than others in every socio-economic system. But I personally believe that a lot of American poverty is preventable. It stems from our screwed up priorities -- consumerism, status symbol possessions, credit, etc. For every coal miner risking his life every day and making just barely enough to feed his family off a dollar menu, there are many more who are just plain living beyond their means, seduced by the American consumer culture, saddled with debt they'll never escape. To all practical extents, their salaries are already being garnished, and they don't even know it.

This culture hides a lot of evils, including, imo, the laws that grant corporations the same rights as human beings and that make it illegal for a corporate CEO to do anything that will not increase profit. Since these laws were passed, we have seen a steady erosion of the average American's ability to make an honest decent living, as there is constant pressure on executives to cut payroll so that more money will go to shareholders. The idea that money is owed to the people who actually do the work is forgotten. Do you know that, in the 1980s, one of the most popular executive management how-to books was called "The Sin of Wages" and it was all about how the only way to "save" corporate business was to figure out how to avoid paying for work at all? Recently (perhaps currently) AT&T and other giants were experimenting with programs in which they did not actually pay their employees at all. Instead, they gave them credit cards (!!!) and deposited the payroll into those credit accounts, and the workers were expected to use those cards for everything. But they never actually got their money -- which was owed for work already performed!

Attack these attitudes -- that more is more, and that the best laborer is a slave laborer -- if you want to end poverty. And think about how education can be used to do that.

I completely agree with you. The question I am asking is, will education of any kind fix poverty?
Maybe I didn't say it well enough. One should acquire a marketable skill. There are any number of ways to do that. Once that is done, I think your question answers itself. Can a skilled worker remain poor? It's a lot harder that if that worker were unskilled.

Then again, you need to decide how you want to define poverty. We have "poor" people in the U.S. that would be the envy of folks I've seen in India and Pakistan. We do have some really impoverished people, too. But I'm not sure I'm ready to take off in this direction. It's enough to say that a young man or woman without health insurance isn't really poor.