Child Right to Education

Education is one of the essential right for every child, as it helps to develop their personality and identity as well as their physical and intellectual capabilities. It has an ultimate objective to improve a person's quality of life. It's also a means of helping young children who would grow to become adults escape the deadly disease of poverty. It is therefore an essential tool for the development of economic and social status of a nation which is supposed to be accessible to every child without discrimination. Every child ought to go to school in other to benefit from the opportunities to build a better future that education offers.

 

But sadly, over 50 million children in cities and countries around the world don't have access to nursery and primary education. In the world today, most children look up to some public figures like Barack Obama and his likes as their role models. They want to talk like them, live like them and even dress like them. But then their hopes are quickly dashed when they realize the levels of education this figure went through to attain the height in which they become role models to them. All over the world, education is being preached as the only way to a better life; a life void of fear and poverty, a life where you can stand out anywhere in the world and talk and you will be listened to, a life in which your opinions count. The thought that one would not be able to experience all of this benefits, brings the child to a point of insecurity and often times inferiority complex.

They think they can’t amount to anything and only think of the future as being gloomy. I remember vividly an incident that happened with a friend of mine who I would call Lara in this context, which I could use to confirm my point of view of a child's thinking when he or she doesn't have access to education.

"We had just received our admission letter into a prestigious high school here in Nigeria. We raced home happily eager to show it off to our parents only to get home to meet the sad news of her parent’s death in a ghastly auto crash.

It was totally disheartening but then she didn’t weep as expected, all she did was stare at her admission letter and say to "my life is finished; I could never be a doctor anymore. My hope of wearing the white jacket has been dashed and my poverty has begun.

Everyone present at the scene was shocked at the words that came out of her mouth. To her she had lost her life with her parent's death which would deny her access to education.

 

Education to Lara was her building block and it had been shattered. I didn’t see her again after that day but years later, I heard she died in the hands of ritualists one morning while going to hawk for an old lady. A child's denial to quality education exposes them to the dangers of being killed in accidents while hawking on major roads, the girl- child being raped by unscrupulous young men who lurk around and domestic violence. As an African proverb says "the child is the father of man". This clearly states that a child would one day grow to become a man and the future of a nation is solely dependent on the people in it.

 

Therefore if a child is not well educated, he could never grow to become an informed man and information is knowledge which is needed to grow a nation. I wonder at the future of these nations that have several millions of children who don't have access to education. Therefore we should all work hand in hand to support child education and send a child to school today.

You just might be saving a nation.