Essays

When we speak of universal education as one of thecharacteristics of highly modernized societies and as one ofthe special problems of latecomers to modernization, we meanas a minimum attaining universal or nearly universal literacy. Contrary to our general belief, the great change in historywith regard to literacy rates was not a consequence of theinvention of printing. It is true that China and Japan probablyhad higher literacy rates than any other non-modernizedpeoples, but it is extremely doubtful that literacy ratesexceeded 30 percent of the population concerned either beforeor after printing was invented. The discovery of printing inEurope many centuries later in the fifteenth century did notlead to anything approaching universal literacy, indeed, it isextremely doubtful that literacy rates reached or exceeded 30percent in European settings until well into the nineteenthcentury. Printing has its relevance no doubt, and one wouldnot wish to cite it, but modernization is a more crucial variablein predicting high rates of literacy.

Other things being equal, the more highly modernized apeople, the higher will be their literacy rates until in highlymodernized societies something approaching universal literacyhas been achieved. We use literacy as a synonym for a wholeset of a learning. Learning to write is regarded as the obverseof learning to read, but we also expect a universal literacywith regard to such fields as arithmetic, and even, oddlyenough, some of the general facts and myths of the historyand civics of the peoples concerned. All of these become partof the basic-that is, that which they share or accept to sharewith other members of their society as opposed to thespecialized or intermediate learning of modernized people.Other things being equal, the less modernized a people, the less will be the absolute amount of their basic learning, and the less will be the development of their intermediate or specialized learning. With modernization, the acceleration of development of specialized learning is so enormously greatthat we are sometimes forced into ignoring the enormousincrease in basic learning. Some realization of this, as it appliestoday, is implicit in the joking we do about the "New Math".It is not just a joke. A level of mathematical sophisticationextending increasingly to the use of computers is a part ofbasic learning for our children, though it was not for us. Inconsidering the enormous increase in basic education, no onecan afford to overlook the leveling effect of participation init. When only the elite learn to read, and perhaps, it is onecharacteristic by which you can identify the elite.

Nowadays you can't tell the Joneses from the Astors that way. One of the greatest "democratizing" forces in the historyof the world has been the sharing of a common curriculum.Beyond the basic common curriculum of learning to walk andto talk is to eat and to sleep and control bodily functions andinteract with other human beings; the common curriculum forall humankind has never been so great as it has become withmodernization. Moreover and especially, never before inhistory has it exhibited a tendency to become continuouslygreater all the time. The expansion of basic knowledge is in asense even more spectacular, though usually ignored, thanthe proliferation of the specialized knowledge that rests on itThe most spectacular part of all icebergs is the part you neversee unless you dive deep. It is difficult even to discuss universaleducation as we think of it without referring directly or indirectly to the use of schools as the device to handleeducation.

For non-modernized people in schools, as we think of them,are restricted almost entirely to small portions of the elite.Even for the elite, much of the schooling was provided byindividual tutors and the like, rather than by schools as wethink of them. Schools represent a special organizational device focussed on education. Schools stand in immediate andstark contrast to one of the great universals of the non-modernized experience. The universal is that for the non-modernized, the overwhelming proportion of all educationfor all individuals has taken place in family contexts, not justin the first three years or so of life, but throughout the lifecycle of the individual. As modernization continues, however, it becomes overwhelmingly likely that the vast majority of allthat will be considered education will take place in non-familysettings as schools.

The break is especially dramatic and traumatic forlatecomers who are not yet accustomed, if they are young, tolearning things of great importance from people who are notolder members of their own families. Furthermore, and noless strategic, the older individuals are not used to having their young lean things of great importance from individualswho are not members of their own families and who are notunder their tutelage and control.

The overwhelming majority of ail of the young, especiallyof the non-modernized peoples, spend the vast majority of allof their time, including their learning time, in family contextsor those closely associated with family contexts. Withmodernization all spend an increasing proportion of their timein schools. What happens to them there is a regarded as criticalboth by them and by others. (Even the most negative criticsof our schools regard what happens there as critical even whenthey hold it not to be "relevant".

The general exposure of any substantial proportion of thepopulation to education in terms of schools is something thatno people have experienced much longer than a hundred years.Probably most of the world's population has not had muchexperience with it for as much as half a century. As long asfamilies, or some closely related organizational contexts such.is neighborhood groups, clans, and so forth, are the fact that learning takes place there simply reinforces the generalrelevance of such settings, to the extent that schools replace apart of that, some of the relevance of such contexts is destroyed, but it cannot be automatically replaced by the school context for the vast majority of people the family context is, after all a continuing one.

Even in our own lives where we string schooling out quitelong, the schools are, for practically everybody, specifically a transitional context—a training or preparatory context. Aschool is not a general living context except for those in theprocess of training. This may be one of the reasons why peoplewho remain perpetually in school contexts, as do universityfaculties, have from many points of view a childish aura aboutthem. It may also explain why life in school at any level—even when the great majority of all those of appropriate ageexperience it—it somehow is still generally regarded assomething apart from the "real world." Today we not onlytake universal education for granted and education in termsof schools for granted; we also take higher education forgranted. Some years ago, in 1935 something in excess of 70percent of US children completed secondary school and morethan 55 percent of those went on to some form of highereducation.

US have reached a situation in which 50 percent of all of thechildren born go on to some form of higher education. Thereare practically none who do not expect and want that percentage to increase. As has been true of secondary schooleducation before, the college education is sure to become apart of the basic education of our people. Japan is the secondcountry to follow. Such advanced schooling is not compatiblewith high rates of productivity in other respects on the partof the students during their school years. Unless we find adifferent way of combining activities with schooling, we shallcontinue to live with the fact that only extremely affluentsocieties can afford to keep any substantial proportion of theiryoung out of other productive pursuits for their first twentyto twenty-two years of life.

To put it in another way, only the members of highlyaffluent societies can make higher education universal. In mostnon-modernized settings even to have aspired to highereducation may be a mark of distinction. In a setting in whichit is a matter of pride to point out that one has failed theentrance examination to the college, those who have had anyexperience of higher education are, indeed, too elite to acceptpositions, which, though beneath their elite distinction, arewell beyond them in experience.

To place them in the kind of bureaucratic positions justifiedby academic snobbery is to place them in positions for whichthey are ill prepared and hence it guarantees troubles for thebureaucracy. To refuse them such positions is to guarantee ahighly disgruntled and articulate elite. In this respect theexperience of armed forces is highly opposite. After all, armedforces, when they are not fighting, are essentially in trainingand educational contexts. An enormous number of armedforces in history have hit upon the following device. Giventhe best recruits attainable, whether by universal conscriptionor by voluntary procedures, those who show aptitude as privates are sent to military schools (or special courses); ifthey succeed at military schools, they are made cadets; if theyare good, they are sent to national academy schools; if theyare good at sergeant schools, they are made sergeants; and soon until, following Peter's Principle, they have been demotedto the level of their incompetence.

What one does without anybody's having thought it out very well is to adjust the level and nature of advanced trainingto the level of relevant experience insofar as that cans bedetermined. There is absolutely no reason why this cannot bedone in non-military contexts. Given the values andrequirements of most of the latecomers, college degrees shouldnot be regarded even as an initial ideal in civili.in governmentalcontexts. Young people who have the required basic educationin literacy could be taken in and sent along for further schoolingas their experience and achievements warrant. That would beone way of getting a closer relationship between experienceand relevant higher education than is presently obtainable. Itis feared a major obstacle to doing this may very well be thatthe military do it and therefore it is automatically consideredinalienably military and hence improper for civilian contexts.There is another factor having to do with higher educationthat is of some importance.

Universities are curious organizations with a long history.In general, only three things have ever been done well in university contexts and the members of most universities haveprobably not succeeded in doing those three very well). Thosethree things are the preservation of knowledge, thetransmission of knowledge, and the discovery of newknowledge. The service of universities to the large communitymust, if the universities are to be viable, consist primarily ofperformances along some combination of these three lines.For a good number of years most of us have been cynicalabout how good a job is done in term of the transmission ofknowledge. No major proportion of the general public haseven been terribly interested in the preservation of knowledge.

So in recent times perhaps the most striking feature ofuniversities has been their contribution to the discovery ofnew knowledge.This is in and by itself a special development. Throughoutmost of their histories, universities have been primarilyimportant for their contribution to the preservation andtransmission of knowledge. As the modernization processdeveloped, two curious things took place. On the one hand, continual increases of basic and specialized knowledge became increasingly critical for survival, let alone the good life, and, on the other hand, the overwhelming organizational focusfor the discovery of new knowledge came to be the universityor a university-simulated organization. Prior to the twentiethcentury, the universities even in the West were not the mainsettings through which contributions to knowledge weredeveloped. By a series of historical accidents, the United Stateshas become the overwhelming repository of world universityresources, especially with regard to contributions to knowledgeat the frontiers of discovery.

Universities are delicately poised and curiously toleratedorganizations. For a whole series of reasons the temptationsfor latecomers to develop them quickly, and for the modernized as well as the non-modernized to attempt to useuniversities for purposes other than the three roles mentionedabove, especially to use them as primarily political devices,are certain to be very great, indeed, both from within andfrom without the university. Such attempts will neveraccomplish the purposes they are intended to serve over anyextended period, but they may easily result in thedestructionof the universities. If that happens generally in the modernizedworld, we shall have to look to other contexts for the discoveryof needed new knowledge, just as those countries that havenot developed universities must do now.