Education isn't the answer. Thanks for this wisdom. The truth is even worse. Education has no value on its own. If not rooted on a solid morale background it can easily be misused as a tool to gain personal benefits to the detriment of the majority of the less privileged in a society. This wisdom is proven every day by the educated African elite...just look to Kenya, where the educated elite scavenges on the poor.
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The Lessons of Rwanda
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Omaar was in Brussels when the killing broke out but quickly found her way to Rwanda. Last week she recalled a visit to a health-care facility in 1994: "I saw blood in the cubicles for premature babies, huge piles of identity cards, toothbrushes, photograph albums, letters … I promised the people who endured what they did [that I would] make sure that the world found out what happened … that I would never forget them."
Omaar has spent 14 years attempting to understand that African holocaust. "I'm not so naive as to believe in the slogan 'Never again,' because [collective violence] happens all the time," she says. But she believes Rwanda shows the horrific consequence when such violence happens with impunity, when the belief is allowed to spread that there is no cost for taking human life. Omaar has also learned that education is no cure. Doctors, politicians and teachers were as brutally complicit as everyone else. Those who shielded their neighbors from violence—at huge personal risk—were "almost universally peasants … It was very shocking to me that education isn't, in the way you want it to be, the answer." The ultimate, and disheartening, lesson of Rwanda may be that there is no foolproof antidote to genocidal madness—short of creating a universe in which all human life is equally revered.
© 2008
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