Intellectual Infrastructure

There are so many ingredients necessary for successful development: social capital, economic resources, participation, good governance and accountability, physical infrastructure... and now I'm getting an up-close and personal look at the importance of intellectual infrastructure. I'm not sure what the proper term is, but I use "intellectual infrastructure" or "intellectual capital" to mean the build-up of education, mental capability, and skills, and abilities, including things like problem solving, entrepreneurship, initiative, and the simple capacity to hear, comprehend, and follow instructions- that a society uses to improve and progress. I suppose these are a bit like good health- you take them for granted until you don't have them. And Haiti definitely suffers a deficit right now.

Where does the problem start? I've already mentioned that the percentage of the population that receives schooling is fairly small, and the percent that finishes high school is tiny. There aren't many venues for alternative education either. The quality and style of education creates its own challenges as well. An authoritarian method that requires rote memorization and allows no room for creative thinking creates a body of people who can recite masses of information but who do not ask questions or develop original work. To be "correct," a student must not only derive the same answer as the professor, she must solve it in the same way. Questions are a way of disrespecting authority, and it is not acceptable to question the Haitian hierarchies that are so strongly enforced. Additionally, the French basis for the educational system emphasizes abstraction over concrete practicality, so students can do high-level math or physics, but cannot apply them to solve the problems around them.

Of course, this is not universal, but I believe that variations from this pattern correspond quite highly with brain drain (the best-educated individuals tend to leaving the country for better opportunities elsewhere), which is another contributing factor in this infrastructural deficit.

Another factor is purely organic. Malnutrition has been a factor for so long that I'm constantly interacting with people of all ages who have simply had their intellectual capacity eroded from childhood. Extreme iodine deficiencies are estimated to be a problem for a third of the population, and incidents of parasites and worms cause anemia in males as well as females. Even in an ideal educational environment, these children will not be capable of learning until their nutritional needs are met.

How does a society overcome these obstacles?

Pwof Ansanm, the group providing the teacher training, is trying to make a dent in the educational style, to spread methods that encourage creativity and problem-solving. The work they're doing, however, has a difficult time counteracting the societal patterns and previous formations that lead so forcefully in the opposite direction....