May 20, 2009

An Overreliance on Education

by Laura Starita

I have a bias towards education—I always want more of it, whether formal or informal. I generally believe that with education people are equipped to do a lot of things, like make better decisions or evoke rights they would not have otherwise known they had. I am clearly not alone in this, as a lot of social and charitable programs—from comprehensive sex education, to vocational training for micro-entrepreneurs—derive from the idea that education helps people do the things and make the decisions that will allow them to ultimately get a better job or earn more money or receive better services or otherwise avail themselves of a lot of things that will make their lives better. Yet a cursory glance at the available evidence has made it clear that, unfortunately, education does not always deliver on its promise.

First, some positive examples: A project in Kenya aimed at informing adolescent girls about the demographics of HIV-infection in their country showed that when girls were told about the risks of having sex with older men—a common practice in East Africa—they avoided those relationships. Score one for education. In another positive example, a microfinance project that added vocational training for a randomly selected group of borrowers resulted in higher earnings for those trained. Interestingly, earnings were even higher for the borrowers who didn’t want to do the training when it was first offered to them. Score two.

But now the negative examples: A project in India geared toward empowering community members to pressure government agencies into providing better educational services had no impact on community activism, despite the program’s focus on informing townspeople about the services they were entitled to, the deficit between promise and delivery, and ways to contact the responsible agencies. Also, preliminary indications from a study aimed at gauging whether ‘financial literacy’ education would help poor market vendors borrow less from moneylenders and save more to finance their business didn’t show evidence of behavior change. Closer to home, an evaluation of abstinence education programs showed they actually did not in fact increase abstinence among participants (though neither do they increase the frequency of ‘unsafe’ sex, a concern of many critics of such programs).

By no means a comprehensive review, these examples nonetheless suggest that simply educating people is not a consistently effective way to influence behavior, much less yield objectively better choices among those educated. Clearly there are other factors in play, such as peer pressure on sexual behavior, or community norms on activism. All of this raises sincere questions about why education works when it does—and how those lessons can be applied to the situations where they do the most good and supplemented where education just isn’t enough.