Education is a lot about signaling. Imaging that Western education itself without the signaling value is able to change the lives in developing countries doesn’t have a good base.
From what I’ve seen studied, a base level of education (eg. basic literacy and numeracy) is absolutely significant in changing lives in developing countries, but thankfully today that’s only applicable for a relatively small and decreasing number of people.
Signaling matters a lot in developing countries for access to jobs as well.
But I do grant that base literacy and numeracy are important. There are some features of Esperanto that make it easier to achieve literacy in it than most natural languages but that’s quite distinct from the arguments that were made in the OP. I don’t see why we would expect much better base numeracy resources.
You can learn mathematics from Khan Academy, there are popular mathematical channels on YouTube, etc. If enough people speak whatever language, there most likely will be a localization of Khan Academy in that language, and probably also at least subtitles for many of the popular channels.
This is not an argument for everyone speaking the same language. Having ten major languages would work almost as well. It just sucks to be a native speaker of a language spoken by few people (or by many people but all of them in developing countries), because then you need to master a foreign language before getting an access to the international wealth of educational resources, so you cannot e.g. learn math from Khan Academy when you are 6 years old.
There are many “open source” resources for all kinds of things, and yet a language barrier can deprive you of them. To make it worse, your social environment is probably also behind the same barrier.
From what I’ve seen studied, a base level of education (eg. basic literacy and numeracy) is absolutely significant in changing lives in developing countries, but thankfully today that’s only applicable for a relatively small and decreasing number of people.
Signaling matters a lot in developing countries for access to jobs as well.
But I do grant that base literacy and numeracy are important. There are some features of Esperanto that make it easier to achieve literacy in it than most natural languages but that’s quite distinct from the arguments that were made in the OP. I don’t see why we would expect much better base numeracy resources.
You can learn mathematics from Khan Academy, there are popular mathematical channels on YouTube, etc. If enough people speak whatever language, there most likely will be a localization of Khan Academy in that language, and probably also at least subtitles for many of the popular channels.
This is not an argument for everyone speaking the same language. Having ten major languages would work almost as well. It just sucks to be a native speaker of a language spoken by few people (or by many people but all of them in developing countries), because then you need to master a foreign language before getting an access to the international wealth of educational resources, so you cannot e.g. learn math from Khan Academy when you are 6 years old.
There are many “open source” resources for all kinds of things, and yet a language barrier can deprive you of them. To make it worse, your social environment is probably also behind the same barrier.