Executive Summary The research summarized in this article shows that schooling is necessary for industrial development. The form of schooling that emerged in the 19th century generates specific cognitive, behavioral and social knowledge that are critical ingredients for the way industrial societies organize: • production and consumption • daily life in cities and nations • the size and fitness of the population for work • the creation and use of knowledge. Therefore, it is documented that: • Schooling is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the spectacular feats of industrial development in the 20th century. • The intricacy of the relationship between schooling and the industrial form of economic growth is confirmed by the technical economics literature. • Economists have demonstrated that both individuals and societies gain from the investments made in schooling. Contacts Charles Fadel, Global Lead, Education, Cisco Systems: cfadel@cisco.com Riel Miller, Principal, xperidox: futures consulting: rielm@yahoo.com By Riel Miller, www.rielmiller.com; commissioned by Cisco Systems, Inc.
2 Cisco Public That education is an essential ingredient of prosperity is at once obvious and contentious. Obvious because any person able to read this text knows what a difference it makes in their lives to have gone to school, to have learned to read, write and calculate. Contentious because when social scientists try to "prove" that education is a cause of economic growth it turns out to be quite difficult to decide which came first, the chicken or the egg. What is more, even the basic terms such as "what is education" and "what is prosperity" become vast and cloudy terrains for the technical experts like economists, sociologists, education specialists and policy analysts. This article offers one way of arriving at a single overarching generalization about the relationship between education, defined as the classroom school system that has been the predominant way of organizing formal education throughout the 20th century, and economic growth, defined as the monetary aggregate GDP (gross domestic product) that is used widely by economists and the press to measure the economic performance of industrial societies. Over the following pages it is argued that the specific form of education system, characterized by universal compulsory classroom schooling, is an indispensable component of an industrial growth society. This is a broader, more historically grounded hypothesis that aims to encompass the wide range of economic, social and political reasons for associating education with growth. It is a hypothesis that rests on clarifying the role of one specific way of organizing learning, universal mass compulsory classroom schooling and the preponderant kinds of knowledge that emerge from this process, with the creation of one particular form of prosperity, typically summarized by the metric of gross domestic product (GDP). The hypothesis is that making investments in all the elements of a school system (teachers, buildings, text books, information technology, curriculum, supervision, testing, etc.) and then forcing young people to attend them (i.e. give up the income they might otherwise earn) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for expanding the gross domestic product of an industrial society. To be clear, the massive systems of universal compulsory schooling pioneered in the 19th century and "perfected" as well as extended to post-secondary education in the 20th century do not encompass all human learning—far from it. What people learn and know, the practices that are informed and inspired by experience and reflection, arise from all kinds of human activity. However the argument here is that the specific cognitive, behavioral and social knowledge, that is the basic result of a specific form of schooling introduced in the 19th century, played and continues to play a crucial role in spectacular feats of industrial development. Economic Growth There can be little doubt that the performance of industrial societies has been nothing short of amazing when it comes to generating monetary wealth. As Angus Maddison (2001) shows in his publication: The World Economy—A Millennial Perspective, GDP per capita in industrial nations exploded from around 1,000 US$ in 1820 to over 21,000 US$ by the late 1990s. Figure 1 below, also from Maddison (2007), provides a detailed global breakdown for the period 1950 to 2003. The evidence is overwhelming. Where industry triumphed so did GDP growth. In Western Europe GDP per capita jumped from just over 4,500 US$ to almost 20,000 US$. In Japan the leap was even greater, from around 2,000 US$ in 1950 to over 20,000 US$ in 2003. With the exception of China, where the recent growth spurt is impressive when seen from the perspective of such a low starting point, those parts of the world where the development of industrial society either stagnated or declined show much lower growth rates of GDP per capita.download
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