What percentage of the world’s population is educated? There are somewhat meaningless statistics floating around the internet. What does it mean to be educated? Is there a list of requirements? Who would generate such a list? Where do people go to receive an education? Do the world’s citizens receive any education?
People learn, but all learning is not educational. What a person learns does not have to be true. It doesn’t have to be wise. learning can be mean, unhealthy, or unkind. What people learn, and how they learn it affects their behavior, and their behavior affects the environment they share across borders and generations.
To find the answers to the questions in the first paragraph there needs to be a way to identify education, and measure it. The grades, the degrees, and the publications that pretend to measure education fail to measure, or even identify it.. They are used as a feeble attempt to measure learning.
The difference between education and learning was not recognized in ancient times. Human behavior was perceived on a moral scale, not an educational one. People were genetically rated somewhere between superhuman and subhuman. People of different cultures, different skin coloration, or unfamiliar religions were often considered evil. Humanity was not a shared trait. Inhumane behavior was justified, supported, and lauded just as it is today. WIP, (war, injustice, and poverty) has its roots firmly planted in superstition,
People have learned some things that make the distinction between learning and education important. A major one is this. There is one very fragile environment that people can inhabit. Sharing it is infinitely smarter than fighting over it. People are capable of improving it for the survival, the capability, and the enjoyability of every person and every generation. Education is how we can learn how to be successful, and humane.
WIP has caused unnecessary meaningless death, and miserable existence for countless centuries. History’s tragic cycle is caused by an educational void. It is not mandatory that people remain unsafe, unkind, and incapable, humanely incompetent.
Education, unlike learning, has a particular direction. Learning how to improve the environment is educational. Learning is an amount. Education is a direction. Learning that produces harm is not educational. How can education be measured if it isn’t an amount?
The educational variable is behavior. Learning that produces kindness, capability, and consideration is education. like electricity it can only be measured by its effect on its environment.
One World, One People, One Future 