A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
PACIFIC DAILY NEWS
I had begun writing on a different topic for today’s column. On Jan. 21, the U.S.-based International Republican Institute released the results of a survey that said 76 percent of Cambodians are satisfied with the direction of the country, citing infrastructure improvements such as roads, bridges, buildings and schools, and 23 percent say it is headed in the wrong direction, citing corruption, unemployment, poverty and inflation.
Statistics are awesome. They can be made to say many things. They are numbers with no feeling. Only real people laugh and cry. Elite kids spend $2,000 drinking at a nightclub, others scavenge city dumps for food. Functionaries write checks for $50,000 like it’s nothing while some citizens, evicted from their only homes, are beaten by police.
During a coffee break, I read the March 28 New York Times “Tools for Thinking” by David Brooks. A day after, Brooks’ “More Tools for Thinking” appeared. Then, an email arrived from Phnom Penh. The writer read my column, “Young Khmers key to the future,” and said I hit the nail on the head. He described the country’s “visible hardware” — buildings — everywhere, bemoaned its lack of the much needed “software” — informed critical thinkers. A strong culture of suspicion and mistrust will “cripple society even deeper into a passive coma,” he said.
“Even many of the young are now in this unfortunate trend,” he wrote.
His hypothesis about Cambodia’s future parallels my own. Cambodia is a nation of youth. More than half of the populace is under the age of 21. The median age is 22.9 years, but Cambodia spends only 1.6 percent of itsGDP on education.
An uneducated populace is consigned to low-skill, low-wage jobs — 4 million live below the poverty line. As significant is the reality that those who lack education also lack the tangible and intangible resources that catalyze change, a likely calculation of a regime that breeds fear and corruption and disdains its people’s rights.
I scrapped my column on the survey. That email redirected me.
Symposium
As regular readers may have surmised, I don’t write this column to win popularity. I am trying, in my way, to spark some action from Cambodians, many of whom seem to have their heads in the sand, so to speak. Cambodia’s future depends on how its people think. In furtherance of my mission, I came across Brooks’ columns referencing a symposium on the mind and society sponsored by the Edge World Question Center.
Please click here to read more...
Statistics are awesome. They can be made to say many things. They are numbers with no feeling. Only real people laugh and cry. Elite kids spend $2,000 drinking at a nightclub, others scavenge city dumps for food. Functionaries write checks for $50,000 like it’s nothing while some citizens, evicted from their only homes, are beaten by police.
During a coffee break, I read the March 28 New York Times “Tools for Thinking” by David Brooks. A day after, Brooks’ “More Tools for Thinking” appeared. Then, an email arrived from Phnom Penh. The writer read my column, “Young Khmers key to the future,” and said I hit the nail on the head. He described the country’s “visible hardware” — buildings — everywhere, bemoaned its lack of the much needed “software” — informed critical thinkers. A strong culture of suspicion and mistrust will “cripple society even deeper into a passive coma,” he said.
“Even many of the young are now in this unfortunate trend,” he wrote.
His hypothesis about Cambodia’s future parallels my own. Cambodia is a nation of youth. More than half of the populace is under the age of 21. The median age is 22.9 years, but Cambodia spends only 1.6 percent of itsGDP on education.
An uneducated populace is consigned to low-skill, low-wage jobs — 4 million live below the poverty line. As significant is the reality that those who lack education also lack the tangible and intangible resources that catalyze change, a likely calculation of a regime that breeds fear and corruption and disdains its people’s rights.
I scrapped my column on the survey. That email redirected me.
Symposium
As regular readers may have surmised, I don’t write this column to win popularity. I am trying, in my way, to spark some action from Cambodians, many of whom seem to have their heads in the sand, so to speak. Cambodia’s future depends on how its people think. In furtherance of my mission, I came across Brooks’ columns referencing a symposium on the mind and society sponsored by the Edge World Question Center.
Please click here to read more...
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