The Future Growth in Education and Opportunity

           Chapter 21 shows the increase in the amount of education that

        young people in the world have been acquiring.  This education

        implies an increase in opportunities to use their talents for

        their own and their families' benefits; the realization of these

        talents benefits others in society as well as those persons.

        This trend is to me one of the most important, and one of the

        most happy, of all trends in the human enterprise.  One can see

        the results in the nameplates on professors' doors in departments

        of computer science and chemistry (for example) in universities

        all over the United States--Asian and African names that would

        not have been there a decade or two ago.  Less and less often

        will people of genius and strong character live out their entire

        lives in isolated villages where they cannot contribute to

        civilization.

           Quantitative evidence for the spread of education and of

        access to knowledge can be seen in the statistics of world

        education in chapter 21.   But the most compelling evidence is

        found in the stories of individuals such as William Owens (see

        his astounding autobiography), who grew up just after the turn of

        the century in Pin Hook, Texas, so poor that he could not get

        more than a few months of schooling in each of the few years when

        he got any at all, and could obtain literally nothing to read--

        some old newspapers pasted onto the walls of a shack in which he

        lived, to keep out drafts, were the most he could find for a

        while.  By the time Owens had miraculously become a professor of

        literature and folklore at Columbia University, access to reading

        material had become universal in the United States, and there

        were good schools and even wonderful junior colleges within the

        reach of just about every American.

           Yes, Gutenberg's invention of printing was crucial.  But it

        was the rise in economic productivity that has brought the

        benefits of that invention within reach of humanity at large.

        Aside from our victory against premature death in the past

        century, this spread of education and knowledge may be the most

        important alteration of all time in human welfare.

           As with other aspects of the globalization of a modern

        standard of living, the process of providing enough education to

        liberate all young people and to empower them to exercise their

        talents to the fullest is far from complete.  One can still see

        children sharing rickety desks and scarce books in a near-

        subsistence Colombian fishing village, just two miles from a busy

        international airport.  Yet the situation there is better than it

        was just a few years ago when there was no school at all.  We can

        be confident that a century from now scenes like that poor school

        will be few and far between. The children will have become too

        valuable to others to allow them to grow up that way.


        page 1 article5 futurprb October 5, 1995