Between Hope and History - Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton, in one of his books - Between Hope and History - talks about ORC. He talks about creating Opportunities for American people; helps encourage Responsibility; and finally emphasizes Community strengthening. ORC is Clinton's political model/vision for his tenure.

In one of his pages he said that, if we want people to get out of poverty, we must create equality of opportunity for them to make a choice.

I wonder what our policy makers do. Forget equality; we can't even think of extending opportunity for them to make a choice. Take for example the case of basic education. Look at its quality standard. If our people, I mean the majority of people, who live in the rural areas and exist below poverty line, don't have access to a minimally quality education, the time spent by their children in the state run schools would be useless because it would not build any of their capacities or capabilities to compete in future.

But the bigger question is why should these poor people send their children to government schools? It's a question of 'cost of opportunity'. If a child goes to government school but at the end of the day, doesn't learn anything he/she loses her time. And if the child continuously goes to a school where he/she doesn't learn anything at all, the child will be constrained to think of little value to education. For the child, education will be nothing but loitering away of the time resource.  On the other, if the child would be engaged by his/her father in some work, the child would not only learn some surviving skills when he/she grows up but would also help family in winning its bread. Hence the choice solely rests with the state : whether to provide quality education or persist with the sub standard education service. The poor parents have actually no choice. The logic as well as economic sense suggests they should not at all send thier kids to government schools for wastage of time.

Ofcoruse there are exceptions in the state sector as well. We can still find some good schools doing some great contribution. But we as public policy makers, failed to capitalize on their model. We would not like to investigate why one government school is working where majority of others are not working. Perhaps we don't want to ensure minimum service standards (MSS) for our schools, learning from such schools and also learning from various NGO run as well as low cost  private schools. Ask anyone in the districts, they will point out political interference in the education affairs, and political patronage for the inefficient and corrupt within the education system. No body dares belling the cat!

But coming back to hope and history, I would just say we need to put in our efforts either individually or collectively to create opportunity for our people, relying less on the state to make things better for us. Yes, however, we can seek to make government accountable by creating awareness what government has done so far, and now where it should go in future.