Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

It’s been a long time since our culture’s store of knowledge could be passed along by storytelling and apprenticeship. Formal schools are millennia old; I grew up with the Talmudic story of the 1st-century Rabbi Hillel who as a young man nearly froze to death after he climbed onto the roof of a school whose tuition he could not afford so that he could eavesdrop on lessons through the skylight. At various times, schools have been charged with instilling practical, religious, or patriotic wisdom in the young, but the Enlightenment, with its apotheosis of knowledge, would broaden their remit. “With the coming of the modern age,” the educational theorist George Counts observes, “formal education assumed a significance far in excess of anything that the world had yet seen. The school, which had been a minor social agency in most of the societies of the past, directly affecting the lives of but a small fraction of the population, expanded horizontally and vertically until it took its place along with the state, the church, the family and property as one of society’s most powerful institutions.”³ Today, education is compulsory in most countries, and it is recognized as a fundamental human right by the 170 members of the United Nations that signed the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.⁴

The mind-altering effects of education extend to every sphere of life, in ways that range from the obvious to the spooky. At the obvious end of the range, we saw in chapter 6 that a little knowledge about sanitation, nutrition, and safe sex can go a long way toward improving health and extending life. Also obvious is that literacy and numeracy are the foundations of modern wealth creation. In the developing world a young woman can’t even work as a household servant if she is unable to read a note or count out supplies, and higher rungs of the occupational ladder require ever-increasing abilities to understand technical material. The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely.⁵

As with every question in social science, correlation is not causation. Do better-educated countries get richer, or can richer countries afford more education? One way to cut the knot is to take advantage of the fact that a cause must precede its effect. Studies that assess education at Time 1 and wealth at Time 2, holding all else constant, suggest that investing in education really does make countries richer. At least it does if the education is secular and rationalistic. Until the 20th century, Spain was an economic laggard among Western countries, even though Spaniards were highly schooled, because Spanish education was controlled by the Catholic Church, and “the children of the masses received only oral instruction in the Creed, the catechism, and a few simple manual skills. . . . Science, mathematics, political economy, and secular history were considered too controversial for anyone but trained theologians.”⁶ Clerical meddling has similarly been blamed for the economic lag of parts of the Arab world today.⁷

At the more spiritual end of the range, education brings gifts that go well beyond practical know-how and economic growth: better education today makes a country more democratic and peaceful tomorrow.⁸ The wide-ranging effects of education make it hard to discern the intervening links in the causal chain from formal schooling to social harmony. Some of the links may simply be demographic and economic. Better-educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men.⁹ And better-educated countries are richer, and as we saw in chapters 11 and 14, richer countries tend to be more peaceful and democratic.