Analyze the Effects of Education on Development of Countries
In the past few years, many countries are in the high speed of development process. During this competitive period, the demand for talent worldwide is increasing rapidly. The governments are gradually aware of the importance in investing in education to improve their governance. For instance, around the world 78 percent of children graduated from primary school in 2000, while by 2005 this figure rose to 83 percent (Brown, 2008). Education is now considered at the top priority in a nation’s development. There is not an overstatement that each country needs an education system which is adapted to the condition of a country. Moreover, every country is still mapping out a road towards a proper education system. In this long transition, education has brought many effects to the development on economy, politics and society. This essay will examine each of these three key points individually and consider how education has affected the development of countries.
Education is important to the individual’s economy. There is a huge gap between the rich and the poor at present all over the world. Poverty seems to be inherited, and the majority of these poor are the children of people who lived in poverty and are not able to acquire knowledge as equally as the rich peers do. The result of this is that poor children have to struggle to compete with adults to gain jobs. However, there is a solution which is offering poor children basic knowledge, because the education is the main key to getting rid of the condition of poverty (Brown, 2008). Education is very important to a child’s future development. A good education will be the cornerstone where future employment opportunities and good chances are established (Plan, 2008). Evidence shows that, more years of schooling leads to higher income. For instance, for rural residents, education can help them make more resources available to use, such as to produce more efficiently on their land, to sell surplus crops, or to manage the budget of their household.
The failure to solve problems on educating individuals well will lead to an enormous negative impact on the whole country’s economy, because hundreds of thousands of us individuals make up a big family, our country. In particularly, failure to educate girls will hamper the development of the country’s economy. PLAN which is one of the world’s largest aid and development organizations, conducted an analysis which showed that about 65 developing countries failed to educate their girls as equal as boys. The result of this is that these countries were losing on economic growth of every year about an estimated $92 billion (OECD, 2008). However, if government devotes itself to increase the number of girls receiving education, numbers of studies has shown that it will have a positive effect on increasing a country’s per capita economic growth (King and Mason, 2001). Or rather, it will create a better environment for economic growth (Dollar and Gatti, 1999). For another direct case, China has millions of students, many more than the number of the available enrolment. But the government discourages entrepreneurs establishing private university to solve this problem. Hence some 121,000 Chinese students studied abroad during 1995-1996. If it is estimated that each student paid $5000 for tuition, there was about $600 million a year given to foreign countries (Dahlman and Aubert, 2001).
Education has a huge positive effect on a country’s economy growth. Education has a boost to increase a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and narrow the gap between rich and poor. In the past few years, it could merely be supposed that education seems have a certain important positive effect on a country’s economic growth. Now, in a study, researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences have successfully proved this assumption by a new dataset which shows education does have a consistently positive and significant effect on a country’s economic development with solid evidence (Lutz, et al, 2008). It is necessary to put education in a priority place for long-term economic construction. In the beginning construction period of Singapore, due to lack of resources and land, the government faced tremendous problems in developing the country’s economy. But government kept on paying highly attention to education and developing technology-intensive industries and high-tech industries which promoted the economy growth. Goh stated that ‘national integration through a national education system was seen as the key condition for economy survival (2008).
Economical prosperity is related to the political stability during the process of education by the illustrations of next three countries. In China, children achieve education which is based on national policy. There are some distinct examples showing how these two things interact socially. In order to make sure that every adult is aware of the right to vote for National Peoples’ Congress members, the government popularizes universal education policy in some rural regions. This policy can help peasants get rid of being illiterates and then avoid being neglecting by local governments in the name of illiterates. Due to the realization that education assists a ruler in governing a country and strength the politic, China now carries out the policy that encourages all the citizens to receive education and get the political awareness. From the vision of the globe, education can still be considered as an appropriate solution to make politic system known to every citizen and attract attention. In addition to the universal education policy, governments make efforts to maneuver the study passion. There are also policies about reforming the curriculums to eliminate extra subjects and then the curriculums can be more relevant, interdisciplinary, and flexible.（Wu, 2006）It is perceived as an innovation in education especially for the top school. Students in China all look forward to attending the universities of Project 985 or project211. So if the government provide more funding and promote more positive policies for these top universities, then the competitive both in external and back of the admission will be fiercer and unexpectable. Most schools with poor qualities and deficient faculties may get into trouble with continuing develop. Most of time, the governors or policy makers focus more on school with potential developments. This may lead to another invisible inequality in education system. It remains a controversial problem whether top university should cooperate with rural region university to carry on the developments together. The policy should notice the average quality of the whole society is not only for the few because development is for the whole country not only for developed areas.
In Singapore, great quantities of reforms were carried out during the development period. A strong will, a stable government and effective planning are key points in charting Singapore’s success (Goh and Gopinathan, 2008). Since 1965, the government has recognized that becoming an equitable and rapid developing country needs every child’s participation in education. They encouraged the policy of four languages English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil (Goh and Gopinathan, 2008). This made Singapore a welcomed country due to the decrease of communication barriers. Moreover, there was also a “Textbook for ALL” policy (Goh and Gopinathan, 2008) in order to achieve universal education and some patriotic curricula to stabilize the regime. These may enhance public awareness to the countries and show strong love to their motherland. Meanwhile, elite education can select the amount of people to take part in politics. These kinds of education can focus on discovery of potential ability so that suitable people would come to power to in charge of the society and then make more efficient policy. This positive cycle will develop the core in the social progress. Also, high level education will reduce corruption because of shame and sense of honor. In addition to building self-understanding capability, the whole society bans this behavior then none of its citizens dare corrupt.
In some developing countries, the governments try to introduce new measures to stimulate the local education systems. For instance, the Indian institute of technology was set up by the government to provide elite education. “National aspiration, national perspectives and trends world-wide” (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, 2007) is not only the school mission, but also the policy of the country’s education development. India’s high-technology develops rapidly. It can prove that the government’s policy on first-class high-tech talent deserved plaudits. In addition, there are also some policies aiming at uneducated people. The adult education which is initiation of National Literacy Mission is for teaching illiterates of age group15-35. It can make them aware of the day-to-day realities of their surroundings (India’s No.1 Maps Site, 2005) which resembles China’s education in rural regions. But India’s system offers nationals multiple choices: the distance learning centre and integrated education for disabled children which are more thoughtful and well-established than other developing countries. For a country of large population, India’s policies which both pay attention on children’ academic education and lay emphasis on the other citizens’ practical education are of vital significance.
Education is the main factor which not only strengthens a country’s economy and politics, but also makes a great contribution to the development of a society. The effect of education on society can be examined from three different aspects: environment, population and culture. It is now widely accepted that human activities around the world are causing damage to the environment, but the environment condition can be improved via education in many ways. New ways can be invented to discover resources and new technology can make it possible to invent more environmental products to protect our environment and ecological balance. The invention of Ornilux bird-safe glass can help the society know more about this point. This kind of glass has a patterned UV reflective coating can make it visible to birds when maintaining transparency to the human eye, so glass can hurt fewer birds(Ornilux, 2010). It is an environment-friendly product. Education growth in countries also has disadvantages; sometimes it is bad for sustainable development. For example, people with higher education will get higher income, this leads to higher resource consumption in U.S.A (UNESCO, 2006).
Education has an enormous effect on population. This can be seen in two ways. The first is that if a country pays attention to education, the quantity of population often decreases. To prove this, a conclusion of Lutz (2008) can help. He had a research that fertility of well-educated woman falls in 3 African countries. It means everyone can get more resources because of the decrease of population’s lives in these countries. It results in less competition among people. The second is the quality of population, this is also very important. Brown (2008) shows that education can make children know more about the risks of HIV and make children protect themselves correctly. Then the quality of population’s lives can be improved in the future and their families can also live better.
The effect on culture cannot be ignored. As it mentioned at the beginning of the essay, individual can get job easily after education. Individual can also improve personal cultivation, affect mental behavior and life style. Education can accelerate the speed of cultural development, most people want to get more information in school and try to do more to their countries and families, there exists an impetus to make them learn more. Nothing is exactly right or wrong. Sometimes, education also do harm to the society in the development of a country. Pollution in U.S.A (UNESCO, 2006) is a good example. If children have higher education, they have chance to earn more in the future and most of them want to live better. It also means resource consumption will appear. It is a negative effect on sustainability in U.S.A.
Now after close examination, it is not difficult to draw the conclusion that education has increasingly growing impacts on economic development. In brief，Education is considered as the key for individuals to gain a good job and a bright future. It also has a boost effect to a country’s economic development. In society, education can protect the environment, improve the living quality and accelerate the speed of cultural development. At the same time, with the supports of abundant policies made by the governments, politics inevitably become an approach to invigorate education, consolidate the regime, and finally lead to a harmonious society. With more attention being paid to education, countries benefit a lot and the trend of development investment will be reinforced gradually. More steps should be taken in education to reach a bright prospect in the countries’ development.

Words: 2,086
Reference list
Brown, L.(2008) Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Earth Policy Institute

Dahlman, C.J., and Aubert, J-E. (2001) China and the knowledge Economy: Seizing the 21st Century. Washington D.C, USA: World Bank Publications

Dollar, D. and Gatti, R. (1999) Gender Equality, Income and Growth: Are good times good for women? Washington DC: Development Research Group, The World Bank

Glas, K.(2010) The Future of Bird Safe Architecture is Clear [online]. Available from: [24/11/ 2010]

Goh, C.H. and Gopinathan,S. (2008) ‘The Development of Education in Singapore since 1965’. In Lee, S. K., Goh, C. B., Fredriksen, B. and Tan, J.P. (eds.) Toward a Better Future: Education and Training for Economic Development in Singapore since 1965. Washington DC: The World Bank

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (2007) About IIT Bombay. [online]. Available from:< http://www.iitb.ac.in/about/about_iitb.html>[06/12/10]

India’s No.1 Maps Site (2005) India Education: Education Policy.[online]. Available from:< http://www.mapsofindia.com/india-education.html>
[06/12/10]

King, E.M., and Mason, A.D. (2001) Engendering Development: Through gender equality in rights, resources and voice. Washington DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press

Lutz W, Goujon, A and Samir, K.C. (2008). Education: The Key to Development. Options (Summer 2008): 12-15. [Online]Available from: [15/06/10]

Smith, L.C., and Haddad, L.J. (1999) Explaining Child Malnutrition in Developing Countries: A cross-country analysis. Washington DC: International Food Policy Research Institute

UNESCO (2006) Education for Sustainable Development Toolkit. Paris: UNESCO Publishing

Wu, W.P. (2006)’Building Research Universities for Knowledge Transfer: The case of China’. In Yusuf, S. and Nabeshima, K. (eds.) How Universities can Promote Economic Growth. Washington DC: The World Bank