Thanks for sharing, Lauren! I appreciate the humility about the difficult epistemic situation we are in with respect to education in developing country schools.
So, really, we just don’t know what you get from education in a developing country. We don’t know how much more you are likely to earn if you stick through high school. We don’t know if you’ll even make any more money. If you do make more money from going to more school, we don’t really know why. It could be that you just came from a family that was always going to use their connections for you. Or it could be because you’ve learned to read and write. Or it could be because you’ve learned to manage your own time and cooperate with others.
All are plausible, but we don’t know which one is true — or if all of them are a little bit true. We can’t know if we’re succeeding unless we understand what success means.
Thanks for sharing, Lauren! I appreciate the humility about the difficult epistemic situation we are in with respect to education in developing country schools.