Many of the subsistence farmers have a crapton of knowledge about their environment and how to make stuff grow. Many of them are pretty good at basic redneck engineering too. That's a pretty good background to get hold of basic programming which is not that far off.
If I absolutely had to work full days ( which incidentally isn't limited to 8 hours a week in all countries in all jobs) to make ends meet, my chance of finding my calling would have been pretty slim.
In other words, just the learning tools are not enough, it's but one of the necessary resources, and for some people spare time or strength can be very difficult to find.
And many farmers (labour, whatever) do know how important it is to give kids time to study things. TBH for me parents who drive kids around to all sorts of extra-curriculum activities for me seem to be much worse than free-range parents who just ensure that kids have time to pursue things they like. Just with some navigation to ensure they don't spend all the time partying. Which is also important though.
Moreover the effects of capitalist-globalism have, I would posit, given rise to poverty in many instances with first-movers advantage, selectively shunting trade into some nations and away from others. If one nation elects to adopt the Western zeitgeist, and their neighbors neglect it, their neighbors will suffer as a product of their lack of technology. This will decrease the proportion of product to labor, increasing production cost (including non-monetary expense). [This creates huge reserves of impoverished people, otherwise known as cheap labor] pidgeonholing them into deals with the devil. At which point more developed nations can either strongarm them into really shitty compromises or just outright implant leaders. Haiti is a really stunning example of this, where France levied a huge debt against the newly independent nation. Or we can point at Madagascar where the IMF discredited them, eventually forcing them into a position where they couldn't fund malaria vaccines (or anything else for that matter).
On Madagascar from David Graeber's Debt: the First 5,000 Years:
"France invaded Madagascar, disbanded the government of then–Queen Ranavalona III, and declared the country a French colony. One of the first things General Gallieni did after “pacification,” as they liked to call it then, was to impose heavy taxes on the Malagasy population, in part so they could reimburse the costs of having been invaded, but also, since French colonies were supposed to be fiscally self-supporting, to defray the costs of building the railroads, highways, bridges, plantations, and so forth that the French regime wished to build. Malagasy taxpayers were never asked whether they wanted these railroads, highways, bridges, and plantations, or allowed much input into where and how they were built."
On Haiti from David Graeber's Debt: the First 5,000 Years:
"Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon’s armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars), and the resultant embargo ensured that the name “Haiti” has been a synonym for debt, poverty, and human misery ever since."
The whole angle of dragging a people up is bullshit. The US alone has installed leaders and toppled parties repeatedly to maintain our status quo, and historically empires just do this. And it's always justified with some magical self-righting pretense. We do as much damage on a cultural scale as we do good on an economic one - when we're not doing damage to both, which I think is certainly the most frequent case. And let's not get started on the various military interventions over the history of the US...
I have no position on your argument other than those examples aren’t making it for you.
Not to mention the fact that the IMF (International Monetary Fund) is the posterchild institution forwarding the Neo-liberal Gloablist agenda.
The idea being that global trade should act as a mutually beneficial agreement without needing force of arms, trade protection or extractive colonial policies. Rather than 1 party sucking all the resources from another in a zero sum way.
It's "extractive colonial policies" obfuscated through tools of finance, where force of arms has been a reality in some cases, in others there are different but nonetheless serious coercive threats, sometimes a little bit of both (plausible deniability, nice). As far as determining whether or not it's single sided, if you're calculating with something as primitive as Pareto efficiency or something equally hamfisted, yes, sure, everyone benefits, some by literal pennies and others by many millions of dollars. It's very much one sided from any [reasonable] moral perspective, at least any moral perspective that hopes to treat humans with any semblance of dignity.
A lot of the pretenses developed nations use to intervene in the affairs of the "Global South" have their roots in colonialism as evinced by the grandparent.
It's almost as if... protectionism is bad. Colonialism and imperialism are inherently protectionist. No matter how talented they were, a Madagascan was prohibited from pursuing the same desirable administrative jobs that were available to the French elite. The French elite prohibited their competitors from offering from offering the Madagascans a better deal.
Also, have you considered the opinion of the "sweatshop" workers because for them the options are "sweatshop" or not working at all
They have a protectionist economy, and it was the most successful economy over the last forty years. China seems to have proven the benefits of protectionism.
And I'm arguing that sweatshop workers would have options other than "'sweatshop' or not working at all" if free trade weren't killing any opportunity they might have to develop local industries.
Their situation is not entirely unlike a small town in America when a WalMart opens, kills the local businesses, and the only remaining jobs are at WalMart.
Yes, without it, other nations could develop competitive industries at the top of the food chain and their citizens would have options other than working in sweatshops.