MY LAW SCHOOL CLASSMATE GENE SPERLING has an oped in the Washington Post today calling for lots of education as a form of international aid. I like this idea, but I see some problems.

People are pretty sensitive to what you teach their kids. The countries that need aid are disproportionately thugocracies. Such regimes usually want to indoctrinate the kids, not teach them. Would we wind up funding something like the Palestinian schools, which are an endless program of hate-the-jews indoctrination? Or the Pakistani madrassas, where all they teach kids is how to memorize the Koran in Arabic, even when the kids don’t speak Arabic?

And if we tried to give them a real education, wouldn’t it create a huge backlash?

None of this means it’s a bad idea, just that there are a lot of bumps in the road. And it’s not worth doing at all if it winds up simply subsidizing anti-American indoctrination, which seems likely to me if international aid organizations are involved.