Education is a powerful weapon for peace

Greg Mortenson’s philosophy can be summed up with this quote from THREE CUPS OF TEA, page 209: “’Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities,’ Mortenson explains. ‘But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is educated girls.’”

Education is a powerful weapon and here in America it is being taken for granted. The state governments are looking at the school budgets and teachers salary as a ready resource in their attempt to balance the budget. It is a sad day in our country.

Education is a powerful weapon against bigotry. What we don’t understand we end up hating or not trusting. We look with suspicion at those who are different than we … they dress differently … they speak a different language … their skin is a different color … their heritage is different … their customs and family values are different … they use a different language and images in their religious expressions … and so we look upon them with suspicion and mistrust. It is a sad day in our country.

Education is a powerful weapon against terrorism. We are viewed by others in the world with suspicion because of our society’s strength, our military might and some horrible political decisions in the past. As THREE CUPS OF TEA illustrates we “back” a particular group until we get what we want and then we abandon them. The result is a society that is torn apart in a wasteland of destroyed infrastructure and a non-functioning country. We leave them to those with money and bad intentions … and then we wonder what happened when everything explodes in our face. It is a sad day in our country.

Education is a powerful weapon that should be used to bring about not a clone of our society, but what is best for their society. Not what is best for America, but what is best for them. Not what is to our interest, but what will build them up and make them stronger. Education is a powerful weapon that people like Greg Mortenson and the Central Asian Institute are trying to use so that the villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan can become better and actual contributors to their own welfare.

And … you begin with girls! Oh, to have his vision and the courage to act on it!

To play on an old Chinese proverb - Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime – Give a child a lesson and they learn for today, Teach them to read and they discover the wonder of the world for a lifetime … teach them and they make the discovery of the thrill of their minds, teach them to read and you open up the entire world even when they will never leave their small, out of the way village. Teach them … one by one … and it will accomplish what all the armies and military might cannot achieve – safety and peace at home.

Quote for today: What we are trying to do may be just a drop in the ocean, but the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. ~Mother Teresa.