Education or jobs? Which comes first?

“The Depression,” writes David Leonhardt in today’s New York Times Magazine, “didn’t just make Americans tougher.  It made them smarter.”

That’s because when the economy tanked, Leonhardt explains, more people went to school.  “When times are tough, you are less likely to be missing out on a good $20-an-hour job by being in class.”  Secondly, he points out, “(a) downturn reminds people of a degree’s value.”

The opposite is true in the developing world.  Poor countries have always struggled to educate their citizens.  Part of that has to do with the inability to pay teachers and keep school doors open.  The other has to do with the cynical view many in the third world have about education.

“What’s the point of education if there are no jobs when we finish?” a Rwandan student told Elizabeth Scharpf, Founder and Chief Instigating Officer (don’t you love that?) of SHE, Sustainable Health Enterprises.

It is something that I’ve read in NYU professor and AidWatcher’s blogger Bill Easterly’s White Man’s Burden (a book I thoroughly enjoyed) and immediately agreed with.

If you think about it, they’re right.  Why pour resources into learning when an economy isn’t prepared to absorb an educated workforce?  It just forces the most talented to seek opportunities elsewhere.  And hence the “brain drain.”  For a developing country that needs its brightest minds to innovate and create, this is completely counter-productive.

Yet, as I work with entrepreneurs around the world, I’ve come to realize that as much as job creation is important for a developing country to develop, education is critical as well.

Why? Education isn’t just about preparing someone for a job, as President Obama pointed out at Hampton University today.  It’s about expanding one’s imagination and capacity to create.    Innovation comes from ideas.

“Kids in Egypt don’t dream of being inventors,” NYT correspondent Michael Slackman noted to me in Cairo a few months ago.  Much of that has to do, he explains, with the rote education that is forced upon Egyptian students, rather than critical, analytical thinking.

So let’s change the kind of education in the developing world.  But as Leonhardt points out in his piece, those making the policies, and I would argue the donations, must change too.  The current approach to development doesn’t work.  It’s piecemeal working to solve education, raise literacy, end hunger, cure disease or create job in isolation.  Except we don’t live in isolation.

Education or jobs – both come first.

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