The Greatest Investment Ever Made

 Last time, I introduced myself - a humble English teacher from Canada, working in rural Japan. However, I also consider it part of my job to help my students become citizens of the world, and expose them to the notion that we are all inevitably connected, sharing as we do this one small, fragile world, a pale blue dot in the vast desert of space. I consider it a privilege and a duty to educate my students not just about English, but about the larger world beyond their borders. To do that, I keep informed. One consequence, it turns out, is that I feel I need to pass some of this information on to others, and so I write. Another consequence is that I have truly come to understand just how valuable a diverse and ongoing education truly is. Education is, I believe, the greatest single investment that a society can make in its future, and I hope I can convince you of that too. 

 We are, without a doubt, in the midst of one of the greatest revolutions that human society has undergone, on a scale to match or even dwarf the Industrial Revolution. Whether you want to call it the Technological Revolution, or perhaps the Information Age, we are emerging as a global society that has unlocked the secrets of the atom, developed incredible new technologies based on this new knowledge, and are now in the midst of unlocking the secrets of the quantum world. Human knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate, and every year science unlocks amazing new technologies. However, what we do with this knowledge and these technologies depends greatly upon how scientifically literate we are as a society, and this literacy is lagging far behind the advances being made by the scientific community. Clearly, closing this gap is imperative to keeping any society at the forefront of this revolution, and to ensuring the wise stewardship of these new technologies. 

 Our education systems, while progressing, are not progressing quickly enough, given the tools we now possess to facilitate learning, and the new understanding of the learning process which we have gained in the past few decades. Educational Psychology has studied how we learn in great detail, and new technologies that let us peer inside the brain, like fMRI, have greatly facilitated this process. In contrast, our methods of educating our young people still remain firmly rooted in Victorian practices, and remain so underfunded in many countries that modernization of this system remains a virtual impossibility. Modern countries, with economies based increasingly on knowledge production and analysis, would do well to remember that their populations will not be able to compete in such a market for long, unless they ensure cutting-edge education. An educated workforce will very soon be the only workforce worth having. As machines take over the more mundane and dangerous tasks, this will increasingly become the case.

 Not only is a literate and well-informed populace important to sustaining a modern economy, but a greater degree of scientific literacy helps to ensure innovation, which also drives economies forward. Innovation is, almost always, a by-product of collaboration between scientifically literate people, whether it be by accident or by design. Simply having more scientifically literate people around and providing them with opportunities to collaborate guarantees that a society will be able to generate new ideas. Whether it be new technology, methods to make existing products and practices more efficient, or simply a deeper understanding of the universe in which we live, innovation creates marketable products and ideas, that inevitably drive economies in a hundred ways. Even if one doesn't particularly value science in itself, the economic and sociological arguments for supporting it should be glaringly self-evident.

  As Carl Sagan put it: “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” In other words, we run the risk of mismanaging our technologies if we lack the proper understanding of them, and we see this happening in the world today, particularly in politics. Promising new technologies, like stem cell research, have been held back by scientifically illiterate politicians (you know who I'm talking about), backed by a scientifically illiterate population. Scientific funding, which could potentially provide immense returns on initial investments in comparison with investments in the military, routinely gets only a fraction of the funding that pours into making guns, bombs and other things that kill people. This kind of collective insanity is only possible when a population doesn't understand the benefits that arise from a detailed, rational view of the world, which of course is exactly what science offers. Science is, to paraphrase Sagan again, more than just a body of knowledge - it is a way or rationally interrogating the world. When you have a population that can do that, it inevitably leads to a richer, more productive and healthier society. 

 The benefits to having a scientifically literate population are not just economic, however. On a sociological level, these benefits run deep. Firstly, crime has a very strong inverse correlation with education, and so as education increases, crime rates plummet. This is not opinion; this is a tested sociological fact. While the reasons may be debatable, the data itself is not, and this in itself is a huge incentive to pursue education. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, democracy itself hinges on an informed population. In a democracy, corruption will have more opportunities to flourish when a populace is unaware of its government's actions, and this is compounded when a significant percentage of the population is uninformed about important facts that impact government policy. It is, for example, much easier to convince a population which is uninformed about climate science that it is acceptable to subsidize fossil fuels in the face of global warming. Only a population that is grossly uninformed (or misinformed) could possibly support this course of action, and yet this is exactly the situation we face in large parts of the developed world today. Citizens that are well-educated and informed are in a much better position to recognize and combat corruption in government, poor policy choices, and to fight for their rights in general. Corrupt governments world wide, you may note, do not invest in education for this very reason, and a shoddy education system should thus be considered a warning sign. An ignorant populace is easier to control, and thus purely self-interested governments have very little incentive to invest in education. This is a right that citizens must fight for - the alternative is powerless, miserable serfdom.

 In the coming century, education stands to play a huge role in shaping our emerging global society. Well-educated countries stand to prosper, and poorly educated countries will face a market in which they simply cannot compete. Providing cheap labour will no longer be a fallback position, as manufacturing will be largely automated, and cost virtually nothing anywhere you go. Education, therefore, will become (if it is not already) a very desirable trait for any country hoping to compete. The future, it should be clear, lies in subsidizing education, such that the price of an education does not prevent anyone from seeking one. Merit, and merit alone, should be the sole determinant for obtaining an education. This ensures that the rich and the poor are not forever locked into these social classes, and that the best and brightest can always flourish to their maximum potential. Indeed, there already countries that are making this type of system work. Opening and encouraging competition between higher education institutions, guaranteeing loans for students who perform well, and allowing loan forgiveness for those who complete a degree successfully are just a few small steps that can help bridge the gap to a completely publicly funded education. This is, ultimately, an investment, and one that will pay immense dividends, but people must be aware that this will take time, perhaps more than one election cycle. Nonetheless, we need to stay committed to education, because whatever the costs may be, they are far outweighed by the costs of allowing our children to grow up in ignorance.