“They are _____.” – CJ said after listening the young men by the vending machine talk.
“How do you know? It is their accent?” – I ask.
“It is everything.”
“Oh.”
****
Mirabilis.ca linked to an article at the BBC entitled, The ‘youngest headmaster in the world’ , in which they feature the heroic efforts of a 16 year old young man to educate the rural poor in his village in West Bengal.
A mainstay of any democratic country is education for all. The idea of a free public education is a recent one, started by reformers in the US and UK in the late 1700s and enacted on a large scale in the mid-1800s to early 1900s. Many would argue that the success of Western industrial democracies in the last 150 years is built on the availability of free public education that a large majority of folks receive up to the 12th grade (6th form in the UK) who are then empowered regardless of class to participate in the economy and growth of their societies.