Knowledge does not change behavior

For my fifth year of college, I won a scholarship based on an essay I wrote about my passion for education and how education is vitally important for creating long-term, permanent change. I tried to avoid the clichés of teaching a man to fish, blah blah, but I did touch on how poverty is a vicious cycle that can't be broken without education.

Now, I'm not so sure that education is all that important. From an excellent article about combating malnutrition in Vietnam:
  

"Knowledge does not change behavior.... We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors."

Encapsulates perfectly the problems of educating clients. It's not enough to get them to understand. Actually, in some cases, making them understand is counterproductive. You have to get them to behave differently: behavioral economics + evolutionary psychology.

So what Sternin did was not lecture and educate, but organize and practice. He gathered the women with malnourished children and had them wash their hands and cook nutritious foods together.

The main point of the article is to demonstrate that the most effective way of solving problems is not to think about them academically and come up with a logical solution, but rather to see what works in the real world and copy/scale/adapt those pre-existing, grass-roots, organically discovered solutions. Sternin didn't know what to do until he went and visited all the households whose kids weren't malnourished (despite being just as poor as everybody else). He saw what they did, copied it, and had the additional genius to realize that education was not the answer.