Take Care of the Child!

Family is the basic unit of any society. Family consists of parents (and grand parents) and children. The family owns resources, big or small, and parents manage those resources. Parents  make efforts to increase their wealth. They wish that their children get healthy food in sufficient quantities. They want their children to remain healthy and strong. Above all,  parents want that their children get a good education so that they become responsible future members of the family. If parents succeed in their efforts, the children will grow up to become active and useful citizens of the family. Thus the children will make positive contribution to family wealth. Even more importantly their educational acquirements and practical skills will take the family's overall consciousness level to a new height. If this process of family building is sustained through next generations, its members will achieve higher and higher levels of excellence and future will be bright.

Assuming that one child out of four of this family gets spoiled and becomes a liability for the family. How this spoiled member will affect the future well being of the family? Will this result in a proportional, say 25%, reduction in  total well being? Let us consider this question in some detail.

If human beings were machines then breakdown of one machine out of  four would result in 25% loss in production. That is simple arithmetic. Unfortunately human beings possess senses and feelings. And these senses and feelings act like viruses. We cannot remain unaffected by the presence of a non performing or malfunctioning  person in our midst. His presence will have a drag down effect on all others close to him. It will result in more than proportionate reduction in well being of present generation and its effects would likely continue to poison next generations too. In the extreme case when such a person becomes inclined towards crime, the cost to the family would be enormous.

This simple narrative helps explain why we as a nation are going down. Nation being just a collection of family units suffers much more damage by a neglect of its children's education  and training than does the family. Vast majority of our children get little education, if at all. As community our perspective about effects of  illiteracy is extremely narrow and misguided. We think, selfishly, that if our children are getting good education why we should worry about street roaming children of the neighbors!

We forget about the viral effect of the presence of uneducated and ill treated members in our society. Have you ever thought about why Western nations run vaccination programs against diseases like plague, TB, cholera, malaria, HIV, hepatitis in Third World countries. Well one reason, apart from pure compassion,  they do so is to protect themselves. They are wise enough to know that any outbreak of any of the dread diseases is ultimately going to affect every corner of the world.

Illiteracy and bad education is more malicious than any of the germs and viruses responsible for the spread of disease. For, effects of illiteracy will not only infiltrate the entire social fabric of the present, it will continue to confound through generations. Believe it, if we feel satisfied that our children are receiving all the care they need, even though the children next door, or the children growing up in the far away tribal belt for that matter, are deprived of the bare basic necessities (education included) of life, our satisfaction is short sighted and short lived. That multitude of today's neglected children will in time create hell for the entire society, including our well cared for darling children. Some of this is already happening today.

So, like Westerners, we must move, if not out of pure compassion for the less fortunate, then for the safety and future prosperity of our own offspring, and make sure that all children around us are given meaningful and appropriate education to any level each of them deserves. We need mass immunization against illiteracy so the seat of germination of agents of disruption is made sterile.