What would you do if you earned about a dollar a day and wanted a better life for your kids?
And what if your local public schools just weren’t working — with teachers often cutting classes or showing up only to sip tea and read the paper, ignoring their students. If you’re like the majority of poor Ghanians, Kenyans, Nigerians, Indians, and Chinese that professor James Tooley has studied over the past decade, you’d pay for private schooling at tuition around $2/month.
From impoverished fishing villages to blighted ghettos like those featured in Slumdog Millionaire, from the largest shanty-town in Africa to the remote farming communities of inland China, the poorest people on Earth are not waiting for educational handouts. They are taking matters into their own hands and sending their children to private schools in their own neighborhoods and villages.
Next Wednesday at noon, James Tooley will be at Cato’s DC headquarters to launch his book The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into how the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.
His stories are compelling — his discovery of private schools serving slum children in Hyderabad, his thoughts while being interrogated by one of Mugabe’s goons in a basement cell in Zimbabwe, his reaction to the party functionary in Gansu, China who told him that the private schools he had just visited did not exist. In addition to James’ stories, you’ll also hear those of Reshma Lohia, who runs Lohia’s Little Angels — a school serving 500 poor children in Hyderabad, India.
When I report my findings that parent-driven education markets outperform state-run school monopolies, one of the most common objections I hear is that many parents — especially poor, marginally-educated ones — couldn’t make wise choices for their kids. If you’ve ever pondered that concern, you owe it to yourself to stop by the Cato Institute next Wednesday at noon. Because James has not only chronicled the existence of private schools serving vast numbers of the poor, he has documented in peer-reviewed studies how their performance compares to that of nearby public schools spending many times as much per pupil.
You can register for the event here and help spread the word on Facebook. We look forward to seeing you.
