Bricks and Mortar or People?

When I was young and idealistic I had a poster on my wall that said:

IT WILL BE A GREAT DAY WHEN 

OUR SCHOOLS HAVE ALL THE MONEY THEY NEED

AND THE ARMY HAS TO HAVE 

A BAKE SALE TO BUY A BOMBER

That must have been at least 20 years ago but I was reminded of this recently while in a forum where we were posed the question, "Bricks and Mortar or People?" We were discussing the future of traditional education and  whether it was more bricks and mortar that was needed or better teaching methods, in order to address the imbalance of access to education in our societies. 

Four out of ten, children, globally, will never enter a classroom; 250 million children don't learn basic reading, writing and math. In South Africa, particularly, we have an entire generation of people who not only had limited access to education but the education we could access was generally of an inferior quality.  If we want to reverse this legacy and impact the future of our country positively, we need to focus our resources on education. With almost 40% of our population children under 18, this is no mean task. 

There are many people who are hungry for their children to now have the education which was denied them. So hungry that they are prepared to walk kilometres or sit under a tree as long as they have a teacher. while I am not advocating that it’s alright to run classes under a tree, I think that (if we have to choose) our resources might be better employed by investing in people.

By training more teachers to teach more children we’ll be approaching this problem from two directions – transferring skills and creating employment for adults AND providing education for our children. It's equally important to ensure that what goes on inside the buildings is what our children deserve. In some of the most deprived regions up to 75% of children still cannot read after several years of school.

Our children deserve a free, quality education so that they may realise their full potential.

Read more in this blog: 
Education to Change the World 

Happy Birthday, Pa

A Man of Character

I met Henning Mankell two years ago at an author's dinner. I had heard him speak the previous day in a talk entitled, A Man of Character.  I sat, enthralled, as he shared his experiences in Mozambique as the director of a community theatre and his involvement with various humanitarian causes. This is why I want to write, I thought. He spoke about greed which, he reflected, seemed to have become a virtue, about poverty - an unnatural state forced on people, and illiteracy - he thought we should be ashamed that we hadn't dealt with this problem yet.

Mankell spent half the year in Sweden and the other in Mozambique since the 1980s. He joked that he lived with one foot in the snow and the other in the sand. "Africa has taught me to be a better European," he said.

He was well-known for his crime fiction books which sold millions of copies and were translated into 40 languages. He explored the human condition through the protagonists in his novels; the mirror of crime tells of the contradictions in society. "Whatever I write, the reality is much worse," he said.

"We are a story-telling and a story-listening people," said Mankell at the dinner. "It is our capacity to talk and eventually to listen, that will save mankind." He told the story of two old African men sitting on a bench outside his theatre. They were talking about a mutual friend who died in the middle of telling a story. "That's not the way to die, without finishing your story," one of the men remarked.

Mankell died last week.  He has left many stories unfinished. 

Picture of author: Wikipedia Commons

For more on the author visit  http://henningmankell.com/