Slate has a decent article up this morning* about the Three Cups of Tea scandal on the pitfalls of focusing on schools as an end, rather than one of many means, to educational development. The author points out one of the major fallacies perpetuated by many well-meaning NGOs, that the reason many children are unable to obtain quality education is because of a lack of infrastructure, rather than because of cultural obstacles, economic disincentives, poor teacher quality, health issues, or a whole host of other problems. While this seems fairly intuitive, the fact that Mortensen has built a nonprofit empire on a series of apparently useless buildings suggests that it’s a harder concept to grasp than one might think. This idea that schools are not a complete answer is also one of my main academic and personal interests, one that I find myself explaining a lot.

The picture in this post is one I took in Cambodia in 2006. I was on a study abroad trip in the region, and my class visited a floating village on Tonle Sap, where our boat passed the children in that photograph. Our guide explained that the boat served as a school “bus,” taking students to a school that – if I remember correctly – was funded at least in part by an outside organization and featured no fees. It was all very heartwarming – I mean, look at those children. They’re in a school boat!

When we got to shore, however, we found ourselves mobbed by a crowd of discernibly school-aged children, begging for whatever we had – money, Coke cans, paper clips. I asked the guide why they weren’t in school, and he looked at me like I was an idiot. “You don’t earn money in school,” he said. “Do you think their parents are going to let them go?”

A common theme in development work revolves around the middle-class American traveling and discovering the existence of poverty. For me, that was never the case. I spent my formative years in a reasonably mixed-income town and started working with what are popularly known as “underprivileged” children when I was in high school, which is to say that I was always somewhat conscious of my own colossal luck at coming from a financially stable situation. What I did discover in Cambodia, however, was the naivete of my own solutions. In college, I had been studying international development, I was deeply interested in education, and for lack of any other knowledge, I had sort of assumed that schools and their absence was the major problem at stake. I was wrong.

Providing education comes with a thousand spillover benefits aside from the empirical one of mental improvement. Education affects capacity to earn income, health, civic participation, mobility. Education brings freedom. But – just like everything else in this world – its absence is generally a holistic problem, and Mortensen’s failures are just the latest example of how easy that is to forget. Which is why I keep pictures like the above around: so I don’t.

*I do take issue with the article’s title, however. “Don’t Build Schools” is not the point. The point is that schools are necessary, but not sufficient, and education already too often gets short shrift in relation to economic development.