What stops you from learning?

What things stop you (or have stopped you) from making the most of the educational opportunities available to you?

Perhaps...

• a lack of interest? (the lecturer obviously knows what they’re talking about but is really boring to listen to)

• a lack of motivation? (my parents want me to study this but I’d rather be doing a different course)

• a lack of energy? (working part time, studying full time, and trying to maintain a social life means sleep is hard to come by)

• a lack of time? (all my extra-curricular activities are making it hard to get my assignments done well and on time)

• a lack of money? (it’s hard to afford to buy text books and a computer, as well as pay rent and buy groceries, when I only work a few hours a week as a casual in retail)

Or...

• the lack of a pencil?

The late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his book 'The Shadow of the Sun’, wrote about an encounter with Ethiopian children:

“It is enough to stop briefly in a village, a town, or simply in a field - a group of children will instantly materialise. All of them indescribably tattered. Little shirts, pants - all frayed and shredded beyond belief. Their entire treasure, their sole nourishment, is a small calabash with a bit of water in it. Each piece of bread or banana will disappear, inhaled, in a fraction of a second. Hunger for these children is something permanent, a way of life, second nature. And yet they do not ask for bread or fruit, or even for money.
They ask for a pencil. The price? Ten cents. Yes, but where can they possibly get ten cents?
They would all like to go to school, they would like to learn. And sometimes they do go to school (a village school is simply a spot in the shade of an enormous mango tree), but they cannot learn to write because they have nothing to write with - they do not own a pencil.” (Kapuscinski, 1998, pp.230-231)

• the lack of feminine hygiene products, meaning that, if you’re a girl, you can’t go to school for a week every month?

A research group from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, spent some time in remote regions of Uganda focusing on literacy and developmental needs in the communities. In one study, they discovered that the teenage girls were all getting very behind in their education. They couldn’t go to school while they had their period because they couldn’t afford any sanitary products, and so they were missing a week of school every month. A number of innovative aid projects started as a result of this finding. One of these was Afripads, which set up a local manufacturing project to make affordable, reusable sanitary products so that the monthly period would no longer be an obstacle to girls going to school. It also provided work and income for local women involved in the manufacturing.