Education alone cannot solve the problem of poverty: Abhijit Banerjee
NEW DELHI : Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee gave a new perspective on the role education plays in solving the problem of poverty among nations. Speaking at the 2021 Yidan Prize summit, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor said education is the key to democracy because it gives people full access to society’s resources and makes them full participants. to various societal activities.
Speaking at the session – “Putting children at the heart of teaching and learning” – with Nobel Prize co-winner Dr Esther Duflo, Banerjee stressed that education can be an aspect important which has helped reduce poverty. He added, however, that he certainly didn’t hold the key to a cost-effective upgrade.
“[Irrespective of whether] education is the key to poverty reduction or not, it is the key to democracy. [Education is fundamental to the] the idea of being in a society where people can be full participants and have full access to society’s resources and their own possibilities. By democracy, I don’t necessarily mean political democracy, but democracy in a deeper sense of giving everyone a chance, ”Banerjee said.
“Education, while it doesn’t increase a person’s income, it certainly makes them a different person. Access to education is in a sense a fundamental element of our conception of a democratic society. In this sense, the economic aspect of education is only one aspect, ”he said.
Abhijit Banerjee, along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for helping to develop an innovative experimental approach to reducing global poverty .
Banerjee said that poverty is not a problem and it is like cancer which manifests different problems and each deserves its own answer … there are different reasons why people are depressed, people are sick, people are not. ‘have no access to financial markets, people have no access to infrastructure.
“… All kinds of very good reasons why people are not reaching their potential. What education does is create their potential, it gives them the possibility to be what they can be. I think that’s a fundamental sense in which education is different. It is constitutive, it makes us who we are, ”Banerjee said, adding that their learnings have shown that poverty cannot be alleviated simply by educating people, as education can become meaningless if markets of labor do not provide jobs.
Duflo said that one of their experiences in Ghana showed that education was responsible for starting the life-change cycle, but at the same time, the lack of a labor market created barriers.
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