Sophie Mcbain's The Learning Curve

Deprivation of Knowledge

In Sophie McBain’s The learning curve, she describes that poverty-stricken children in the African country of Uganda haven’t had an opportunity for secondary school education for years owing to the fact that they couldn’t afford it. Due to the costly expense, only “one in four children of secondary school age” have been enrolled in school in Uganda up until 2008 (Sophie McBain). Those who weren’t privileged with attending school were then consigned to a life of living “on less than $1.25 a day,” condemning them to poverty the rest of their life (Sophie McBain). McBain explains that one of these impoverished children, John-Mary Nantengo, had high aspirations of going to a secondary school during his juvenile years,

One of these clever individuals was George Bergeron, whose extraordinary intellect was shamed and restricted in able to bring him down to an average level mindset so that it was equitable to those without a higher brainpower. He was required to wear a transmitter that played noises, which would scatter his thoughts and inhibit him from using his mind to its full thinking potential so that he wouldn’t outshine anyone else’s intellect. His wife, on the other hand, was less knowledgeable and, therefore, did not have to wear a transmitter to slow her thought process. Instead of the average people given to opportunity to improve their intelligence, the bright people were restrained from using their own thinking capacity. George Bergeron was restricted from his full intellectual potential because of the government’s obsession with enforcing equality similar to how John-Mary Nantengo was restricted from his full intellectual potential because money stood in the way from obtaining education. In McBain’s The learning curve, she describes that the poor were brought up and given the opportunity to education through Peas, exhibiting a positive way to enforce equal opportunity. On the contrary, in Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, the intellect of many individuals was brought down to the level of others,