Wasted on the Young?

On Sunday mornings, my local public radio station broadcasts a BBC News segment called “More or Less” – a regular feature exploring key statistics which describe our changing world.

This Sunday, presenter Ruth Alexander interviewed Dr. Hans Rosling, a Swedish expert on international public health.  Dr. Rosling, who possesses a delightful sense of humor, is founder of the “Ignorance Project” – an attempt to bring citizens of the Western world up-to-date about shifting realities in what they insist on calling the “developing world”.

Reversing roles, Dr. Rosling posed three questions to Ms. Alexander.

First, he asked about measles vaccines, which public health experts agree is the most important vaccine for preventing deaths among young children.  What percentage of the world’s children receive the measles vaccine?  The choices were 20%, 50%, or 80%.

Second, Dr. Rosling asked about the world’s population of children under fifteen.  In 1950, there were fewer than one billion children.  This number had doubled by 2000.  What is the projected number of children in the year 2100?  The options were 2, 3 or 4 billion.

Finally, he turned to the percentage of the world’s population living in desperate poverty.  What trend has prevailed over the past twenty years?  Has that percentage doubled, remained stable, or decreased by half?

Listening, I made my guesses along with the presenter.  I actually got two right.  More than 80% of the world’s children receive the life-saving measles vaccine.  The percentage of people living in extreme poverty has been halved in the past two decades.

I was quite wrong about population trends.  At the end of this century, the projected population of children will be back around 2 billion – about what it was in 2000.  But this will be a crowded century.  World population will rise to 10 or 11 billion before it starts to decline.

I had no idea.

Dr. Rosling asked these same questions to attendees at the prestigious World Economic Forum – at Davos, Switzerland.  The world’s political and corporate leaders did poorly, outscoring random guessing on only one question in three. 

Most educated people, Dr. Rosling said, would do worse – for this reason:  We don’t continue to educate ourselves after we leave college or graduate school.  Our image of the world might be more or less accurate in our early 20s, but thereafter, in grows increasingly outdated. 

Now, here, I must stop referring to Dr. Rosling.  “More or Less” is great radio – and I intend to sign up for the podcast – but it only runs ten minutes.  Ms. Alexander had to thank Dr. Rosling and sign off.

But the lesson of these three questions remains to be examined.  In a sense, it's no marvel that even the Davos crowd did so poorly on the Dr. Rosling’s pop quiz.  Our educational system - our very view of what education is - concerns itself almost entirely with young people.

From time immemorial, the notion of education has focused on transferring knowledge about the world – as it is – to young people. 

Consider our images of education:  parents teaching toddlers their letters; a professor in front of a classroom; a scoutmaster conducting a knot-tying session in a forest glade; a coach helping an athlete improve his technique. 

Each involves an older person passing along time-honored lore to a younger one.

And there’s nothing wrong with that – except that it doesn’t always work, for three reasons:

First, we live in a world which is changing at a faster rate than it has ever changed – at least, since humans evolved.

Second, we live longer lives, on average, than humans have lived in the past.  Thus, the amount of change which takes place between childhood and the end of active adulthood is enormous – and would be, even if change weren’t happening so fast.

Third, as citizens of a republic – and citizens of a planet which, with technology, seems to be moving in a more democratic direction – our need to keep up with our changing world is greater than ever.

The fact that most of us don’t keep up is usually blamed on the fact that we’re busy.

But, looked at another way, it might be said that we're too busy because we divide up the tasks of a lifetime in a way that no longer makes sense.  When we're young,  we're too busy learning, and not busy enough dealing with the "real world".  Thereafter, we're too busy with everyday problems to continue educating ourselves.

And it doesn't have to be that way.

An infant born today, in America, can expect to spend twenty of her first twenty-four years in school.   More, if she wants to enter a profession.

After that, with the exception of job-related training, she will likely spend sixty or seventy years outside the realm of public education – ending her life in a world she simply doesn’t understand.

Perhaps it’s time we moved away from front-loading education so entirely - giving young people a taste of reality before their mid-20s, and building serious continuing education into the lives of adults.

Perhaps we need to get young people into the adult world a few years earlier – re-organizing public education, through a range of technologies, so that it continues to take place throughout a citizen’s entire lifespan.

Educating young people is essential, but it’s not enough. 

Perhaps – as with youth – too much of our educational effort is wasted on the young.