When we speak of universal education as one of the
characteristics of highly modernized societies and as one of the special
problems of latecomers to modernization, we mean as a minimum
attaining universal or nearly universal literacy, Contrary to our general
belief, the great change in history with regard to literacy rates was not a
consequence of the invention of printing. It is true that China and Japan
probably had higher literacy rates than any other non-modernized peoples,
but it is extremely doubtful that literacy rates exceeded 30 percent of the
population concerned either before or after printing was invented. The
discovery of printing in Europe many centuries later in the fifteenth
century did not lead to anything approaching unviersal literacy, indeed, it
is extremely doubtful that literacy rates reached or exceeded 30 percent in
European settings until well into the nineteenth century. Printing has its
relevance no doubt, and one would not wish to cite it, butmodernization is
a more crucial variable in predicting high rates of literacy. Other things
being equal, the more highly modernized a people the higher will be their
literacy rates until in highly modernized societies something approaching
universal literacy has been achieved.
We use literacy as a synonym for a whole set of learnings.
Learning to write its regarded as the obverse of learning to read, but we
also expect a universal literacy with regard to such fields as arithmetic,
and even, oddly enough, some of the general facts and myths of the
history and civics of the peples concerned. All of these become part of the
basic-that is, that which they share or accept to share with other members
of their society – as opposed to the specialized 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 specialised learning.
With modernisation, the accelration of development of specialised learning
is so enormously great that we are sometimes forced into ignoring the
enormous increase in basic learning. Some realization of this as it applies
today is implicit in the joking we do about the “New Math”. It is not just a joke. A level of mathematical sophistication extending increasingly to the
use of computers is a part of basic learning for our children, though it was
not for us.
In considering the enormous increase in basic education, no one
n afford to overlook the levelling effect of participation in it. When only
the elite learn to read – and perhaps it is one characteristic by which you
can identify the elite. Now-a-days you can’t tell the Joneses from the
Astors that way. One of the greatest “democratizing” forces in the history
of the world has been the sharing of a common curriculum. Beyond the
basic common curriculum of learning to walk and to talk and to eat and to
sleep and control bodily functions and interact with other human beings;
the common curriculum for all humankind has never been so great as it
becomes with modernization. Moreover and especially, never before in
history has it exhibited a tendency to become continuously greater all the
time. The expansion of basic knowledge is in a sense even more
spectacular, though usually ignored, than the proliferation of the
sepcialised knowledge that rests on it. The most spectacular part of all
icebergs is the part you never see unless you dive deep.
It is difficult even to discuss universal education as we think of it
without referring directly or indirectly to the use of schools as the device
to handle education. For non modernised people 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 by individual tutors and the
like, rather than by schools as we think of them. Schools represent a
special organisational device focused on education. Schools stand in
immediate and stark contrast to one of the great universals of the non-
modernized experience. That universal is that for the non-modernized the
overwhelming proportion of all education for all individuals has taken
place in family contexts, not just in the first three years or so of life, but
throughout the life cycle of the individual. As modernizaion continues,
however, it becomes overwhelmingly likely that the vast majority of all
that will be considered education will take place in nonfamily settings as
schools. The break is especially dramatic and traumatic for latecomers
who are not yet accustomed, if they are young, to learning things of great
importance from people who are not odler members of their own families.
having their young learn things of great importance from individuals who
Furthermore, and no less strategic, the older individuals are not used to
are not members of their own families and who are not under their especially of the non-modernized people, spend the vast majority of all of
tutelage and control. The overwhelming majority of all of the
their time, including their learning time, in family contexts or those
closely associated with family contexts. With modernization all spend an
increasing proportion of their time in schools. What happens to them there
is regarded as critical both by them and by others. (Even the most negative
critics of our schools regarded what happens there as critical even when
they hold it not to be “relevant”.
The general exposure of any substantial proportion of the
population to eduction in terms of schools is something that no people have
experienced much longer than a hundred years. Probably most of the
world’s population has not had much experience with it for as much as
half a century. As long as families, or some closely related organizational
context such as neighbourhood groups, clans, and so forth, are the ones in
terms of which most people do most things most of the time, that fact that
learning takes place there simply reinforces the general relevance of such
settings. To the extent that schools replace a part of that, some of the
relevance of such context. For the vast majority of people the faimly
context is, after all, a continuing one. Even in our own lives where we
string schooling out quite long, the schools are, for particually everybody,
specifically a transitional context – a training or preparatory. context. A
school is not a general living context except for those in the process of
training. This may be one of the reasons why people who remain
perpetually in school contexts, as do university faculties, have from many
points of view a childish aura about them. It may also expalin why life in
school at any level even when the great majority of all those of
appropriate age experience it – is somehow still generally regarded as
something apart from the “real world.”
Today we not only take universal education for granted and
education in terms of schools for granted: we also take higher education
for granted. Some years ago, in 1905 something in excess of 70 percent of
U.S. children completed secondary school and more than 55 percent
those went on to some form of higher education. U.S. has reached a
situation in which 50 percent of all of the children born go on to some
form of higher education. There are practically none who do not expect
and want that percentage to increase. As has been true of a seconday
school education before, a college education is sure to become a part
the basic education of our people. Japan is the second country to follow. Such advanced schooling is not compatible with high rates of productivity
in other respects on the part of the students during their school years.
shall continue to live with the fact that only extremely affluent societies
Unless we find a different way of combining activities with schooling, we
productive pursuits for their first twenty to twenty-two years of life. To
can afford to keep any substantial proportion of their young out of other
another way, only the members of highly affluent societies can make
higher education universal.
In most non-modernized settings even to have aspired to higher
education may be mark of distinction. In a setting in which it is a matter
a pride to point out that one has failed the entrance examinations to
Cambridge, those who have had any experience of higher education are,
indeed, too elite to accept positions which, though beneath their elite
distinction, are well beyond them in experience. To place them in the kind
of bureaucratic positions justified by academic snobbery is to place them
in positions for which they are ill prepared and hence it guarantees
roubles for the bureaucracy. To refuse them such positions is to guarantee
a highly disgruntled and articulate elite.
In this respect the experience of armed forces is highly opposite.
After all, armed forces, when they are not fighting, are essentially in
maining and educational contexts. An enormous number of armed forces in
history have hit upon the following device. Given the best recruits
attainable, whether by universal conscription or by voluntary procedure,
those who show attitude as privates are sent to corporal schools (of special
courses); if they succeed at corporal schools, they are made corporals; if
they are good corporals, they are sent to sergeant schools, if they are good
at sergeant schools, they are made sergeants; and so on until, following
Peter’s Principle, they have been promoted to the level of their
incompetence. What one does – without anybody’s having thought it out
ery well-is to adjust the level and nature of advanced training to the
level of relevant experience in so far as that can be determined. There is
y no reason why this cannot be done in non-military contexts.
Given the values and requirements of most of the latecomers, college
degrees should not be regarded even as an initial ideal in civilian
governmental contexts. Young people who have the required basic
education in literacy could be taken in and sent along for further schooling
Being a closer relationship between experience and relevant higher
as their experience and achievements warrant. That would be one way of absolutely education than is presently obtainable. It is feared a major obstacle to
automatically considered inalienably military and hence improper for
doing this may very well be that the military do it and therefore it is
civilian contexts.
There is another factor having to do with higher education that is
of some importance. Universities are curious organizations with a
history. In general, only three things have ever been done well in
not succeeded in doing those three very well). Those three things are the
university contexts (and the members of most universities have probably
preservation of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge, and the
discovery of new knowledge. The service of universities to the larger
community must, if the universities are to be viable, consist primarily of
performances along some combination of three lines.
For a good number of years most of us have been cynical about
how good a job is done in term of the transmission of knowledge. No
major proportion of the general public has even been terribly interested in
the preservation of knowledge. So in recent times perhaps the most
striking feature of universities has been their contributions to the discovery
of new knowledge. This is in and of itslef a speical development.
Throughout most of their histories universities have been primarily
important for their contributions to the preservation and transmission of
knowledge. As the modernization process developed, two curious things
took palce. On the one hand, continual increases of basic and specialised
knowledge became increasingly critical for survival, let alone the good
life, and, on the other hand, the overwhelming organizational focus for the
discovery of new knowledge came to be the university or a university
stimulated organization. Prior to the twentieth century, the universities
even in the West were not the main settings through which contributions to
knowledge were developed.
By a series of historical accidents the United States has becom
the overwhelming repository of world university resources, especially
regard to contributions to knowledge at the frontiers of discover
Universities are delicately poised and curiously tolerated organizations
For a whole series of reasons the temptations for latecomers to devel
them quickly, and for the modernized as well as the non-modernized
attempt to use universities for purposes other than the three mention
above, especially to use them as primarily political devices-are certain
…be very great, indeed, both from within and from without the universal Such attempts will never accomplish the purposes they are intended to
survive over any extended period, but they may easily result in the
destruction of the universities. If that happens generally in the modernized
world, we shall have to look to other contexts for the discovery of needed
new knowledge, just as those countries who have not developed
universities must do now.
