Human Development

The problem of human development can be analyzed upon several levels. I will distinguish between macroscopic and microscopic levels of human development. The challenge of macroscopic human development as a function of globalization, modernization and western acculturation, is a combined problem of endemic disease, poverty, violence and lack of fulfillment of human potential. I do not really call this the problem of human development, but rather the problem of persistent, chronic and structurally-socially reinforced human underdevelopment. The challenge of the problem of human development upon the microscopic level is the challenge of education and healthy socialization of the individual child and young adult, usually within a formal classroom and larger curricular context, as well as against a less formal home environment where key social relations and psychological identity are formed and a larger community framework that eventually becomes the main forum for the expression of human potential and productivity in life and where reward and resource structures depend upon the appropriate internalizations of the social constraints and appropriate patterns of response by the individual. The macroscopic and microscopic problems are not entirely unrelated, and we can understand that education of the individual in social context is clearly the best means for the amelioration of the larger scale problem of mass human underdevelopment. At the same time, addressing symptomatic stresses associated with social underdevelopment, such as nutrition, health, work, housing, provide a basic framework for improving the quality and success of microscopic human development.