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

“Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”¹⁹ Unlike measures of well-being that have a natural floor of zero, like war and disease, or a natural ceiling of a hundred percent, like nutrition and literacy, the quest for knowledge is unbounded. Not only does knowledge itself expand indefinitely, but the premium for knowledge in an economy that is driven by technology has been soaring.²⁰ While global rates of literacy and basic education are converging to their natural ceiling, the number of years of schooling, extending into tertiary and postgraduate education in colleges and universities, continues to grow in every country. In 1920, just 28 percent of American teenagers between fourteen and seventeen were in high school; by 1930, the proportion had grown to almost half, and by 2011, 80 percent graduated, of whom almost 70 percent went on to college.²¹ In 1940, less than 5 percent of Americans held a bachelor’s degree; by 2015, almost a third did.²² Figure 16-3 shows the parallel trajectories of the length of schooling in a sample of countries, with recent highs ranging from four years in Sierra Leone to thirteen years (some college) in the United States. According to one projection, by the end of the century more than 90 percent of the world’s population will have some secondary education, and 40 percent some college.²³ Since educated people tend to have fewer children, the growth of education is a major reason that, later in this century, world population is expected to peak and then decline (figure 10-1).

Figure 16-3: Years of schooling, 1870–2010

Source:Our World in Data, Roser & Ortiz-Ospina 2016a, based on data from Lee & Lee 2016. Data are for the population aged 15–64.

Though we see little or no global convergence in the length of formal schooling, an ongoing revolution in the dissemination of knowledge makes the gap less relevant. Most of the world’s knowledge is now online rather than locked in libraries (much of it free), and massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other forms of distance learning are becoming available to anyone with a smartphone.

Other disparities in education are shrinking as well. In the United States, measures of school readiness among low-income, Hispanic, and African American children increased substantially between 1998 and 2010, possibly because free preschool programs are more widely available, and because poor families today have more books, computers, and Internet access and the parents spend more time interacting with their children.²⁴

Even more consequentially, the ultimate form of sex discrimination—keeping girls out of school—is in decline. The change is consequential not just because women make up half the population, so educating them doubles the size of the skill pool, but because the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. When girls are educated, they are healthier, have fewer and healthier children, and are more productive—and so are their countries.²⁵ It took the West centuries to figure out that educating the whole population, not just the half with testicles, was a good idea: the line for England in figure 16-4 shows that Englishwomen did not become as literate as Englishmen until 1885. The world as a whole caught on even later but quickly made up for lost time, going from teaching only two-thirds as many girls as boys to read in 1975 to teaching them in equal numbers in 2014. The United Nations has announced that the world has met the 2015 Millennium Development Goal of achieving gender parity in primary, secondary, and tertiary education.²⁶

Figure 16-4: Female literacy, 1750–2014

Sources: England (all adults): Clark 2007, p. 179. World, Pakistan, & Afghanistan (ages 15–24): HumanProgress, http://www.humanprogress.org/f1/2101, based on data from UNESCO Institute for Statistics, summarized in World Bank 2016f. Data for the world are averaged over slightly different sets of countries in different years.