Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

The well-being of children is yet another case in which lurid headlines terrify news readers even as they have less to be terrified about. Media reports of school shootings, abductions, bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, date rape, and sexual and physical abuse make it seem as if children are living in increasingly perilous times. The data say otherwise. Teenagers’ retreat from dangerous drugs, mentioned in chapter 12, is just one example. In a 2014 review of the literature on violence against children in the United States, the sociologist David Finkelhor and his colleagues reported, “Of 50 trends in exposure examined, there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual victimization.”46 Three of those trends are shown in figure 15-8.

  Figure 15-8: Victimization of children, US, 1993–2012

  Sources: Physical abuse and Sexual abuse (mainly by caregivers): National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, http://www.ndacan.cornell.edu/, analyzed by Finkelhor 2014; Finkelhor et al. 2014. Violent victimization at school: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat. Rates for physical and sexual abuse are per 100,000 children younger than 18. Rates for violent victimization at school are per 10,000 children aged 12–17. The arrows point to 2003 and 2007, the last years plotted in fig. 7–22 and fig. 7–20 in Pinker 2011, respectively.

  Another declining form of violence against children is corporal punishment—the spanking, smacking, paddling, birching, tanning, hiding, thrashing, and other crude methods of behavior modification that parents and teachers have inflicted on helpless children at least since the 7th-century-BCE advisory “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Corporal punishment has been condemned in several United Nations resolutions and has been outlawed in more than half the world’s countries. The United States, once again, is an outlier among advanced democracies in allowing children to be paddled in schools, but even here, approval of all forms of corporal punishment is in slow but steady decline.47

  Nine-year-old Oliver Twist’s stint at picking oakum out of tarry ropes in an English workhouse is a fictional glimpse at one of the most widespread abuses of children, child labor. Together with Dickens’s novel, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” and many journalistic exposés awakened 19th-century readers to the horrific conditions under which children were forced to work in that era. Small children stood on boxes to tend dangerous machinery in mills, mines, and canneries, breathing air thick with cotton or coal dust, kept awake by splashes of cold water in their faces, collapsing into sleep after exhausting shifts with food still in their mouths.

  But the cruelties of child labor did not begin in Victorian factories.48 Children have always been set to work as farmhands and domestics, and they were commonly hired out as servants to other people or as laborers in cottage industries, often from the age when they could walk. In the 17th century, for example, children put to work in a kitchen would crank a spit with a slab of meat for hours, protected from the fire only by a bale of wet hay.49 No one thought of child labor as exploitation; it was a form of moral education, protecting children from idleness and sloth.

  Starting with influential treatises by John Locke in 1693 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, childhood was reconceptualized.50 A carefree youth was now considered a human birthright. Play was an essential form of learning, and the early years of life shaped the adult and determined the future of society. In the decades around the turn of the 20th century, childhood was “sacralized,” as the economist Viviana Zelizer has put it, and children achieved their current status as “economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”51 Under pressure from children’s advocates, and helped along by affluence, smaller families, an expanding circle of sympathy, and an increasing premium on education, Western societies gradually did away with child labor. A snapshot of these forces pushing in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled “Keep the Boy in School”:

  The pressure of urgent Spring work is often the cause of keeping the boy out of school for several months. It may seem necessary—but it isn’t fair to the boy! You are placing a life handicap in his path if you deprive him of education. In this age, education is becoming more and more essential for success and prestige in all walks of life, including farming.

  Should you feel that your own education was neglected, through no fault of yours, then you naturally will want your children to enjoy the benefits of a real education—to have some things you may have missed.

  With the help of a Case Kerosene Tractor it is possible for one man to do more work, in a given time, than a good man and an industrious boy, together, working with horses. By investing in a Case Tractor and Ground Detour Plow and Harrow outfit now, your boy can get his schooling without interruption, and the Spring work will not suffer by his absence.

  Keep the boy in school—and let a Case Kerosene Tractor take his place in the field. You’ll never regret either investment.52

  In many countries the coup de grâce was legislation that made schooling compulsory and thus made child laborers conspicuously illegal. Figure 15-9 shows that the proportion of children in the labor force in England was halved between 1850 and 1910, before child labor was outlawed altogether in 1918, and the United States followed a similar trajectory.

  Figure 15-9: Child labor, 1850–2012

  Sources: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016a, and the following. England: Percentage of children aged 10–14 recorded as working, Cunningham 1996. United States: Whaples 2005. Italy: Child work incidence, ages 10–14, Tonioli & Vecchi 2007. World ILO-EPEAP (International Labour Organization Programme on Estimates and Projections of the Economically Active Population): Child Labor, ages 10–14, Basu 1999. World ILO-IPEC (International Labour Organization International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour): Child Labor, ages 5–17, International Labour Organization 2013.

  The graph also shows the precipitous decline in Italy, together with two recent time series for the world. The lines are not commensurable because of differences in the age ranges and definitions of “child labor,” but they show the same trend: downward. In 2012, 16.7 percent of the world’s children worked an hour a week or more, 10.6 percent engaged in objectionable “child labor” (long hours or tender age), and 5.4 percent engaged in hazardous work—far too many, but less than half the rate of just a dozen years before. Child labor, now as always, is concentrated not in manufacturing but in agriculture, forestry, and fishing, and it goes with national poverty, as both cause and effect: the poorer the country, the larger the percentage of its children who work.53 As wages rise, or when governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of desperation rather than greed.54

  As with other crimes and tragedies of the human condition, progress in ending child labor has been powered both by the global rise of affluence and by humanistic moral campaigns. In 1999, 180 countries ratified the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. The “worst forms” that were banned include hazardous labor and the exploitation of children in slavery, human trafficking, debt bondage, prostitution, pornography, drug trafficking, and war. Though the International Labour Organization’s target of eliminating the worst forms by 2016 was not met, the momentum is unmistakable. The cause was symbolically ratified in 2014 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kailash Satyarthi, the activist against child labor, who had been instrumental in the adoption of the 1999 resolution. He shared the prize with Malala Yousafzai, the heroic advocate for girls’ education. And that brings us to yet another advance in human flourishing, the expansion of access to knowledge.

  CHAPTER 16

  KNOWLEDGE

  Homo sapiens, “knowing man,” is the species that uses information to
resist the rot of entropy and the burdens of evolution. Humans everywhere acquire knowledge about their landscape, its flora and fauna, the tools and weapons that can subdue them, and the networks and norms that entangle them with kin, allies, and enemies. They accumulate and share that knowledge with the use of language, gesture, and face-to-face tutelage.1

  At a few times in history, people have hit on technologies that multiply, indeed, exponentiate, the growth of knowledge, such as writing, printing, and electronic media. The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical.2 To be aware of one’s country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern—such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history.

  It’s been a long time since our culture’s store of knowledge could be passed along by storytelling and apprenticeship. Formal schools are millennia old; I grew up with the Talmudic story of the 1st-century Rabbi Hillel who as a young man nearly froze to death after he climbed onto the roof of a school whose tuition he could not afford so that he could eavesdrop on lessons through the skylight. At various times, schools have been charged with instilling practical, religious, or patriotic wisdom in the young, but the Enlightenment, with its apotheosis of knowledge, would broaden their remit. “With the coming of the modern age,” the educational theorist George Counts observes, “formal education assumed a significance far in excess of anything that the world had yet seen. The school, which had been a minor social agency in most of the societies of the past, directly affecting the lives of but a small fraction of the population, expanded horizontally and vertically until it took its place along with the state, the church, the family and property as one of society’s most powerful institutions.”3 Today, education is compulsory in most countries, and it is recognized as a fundamental human right by the 170 members of the United Nations that signed the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.4

  The mind-altering effects of education extend to every sphere of life, in ways that range from the obvious to the spooky. At the obvious end of the range, we saw in chapter 6 that a little knowledge about sanitation, nutrition, and safe sex can go a long way toward improving health and extending life. Also obvious is that literacy and numeracy are the foundations of modern wealth creation. In the developing world a young woman can’t even work as a household servant if she is unable to read a note or count out supplies, and higher rungs of the occupational ladder require ever-increasing abilities to understand technical material. The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely.5

  As with every question in social science, correlation is not causation. Do better-educated countries get richer, or can richer countries afford more education? One way to cut the knot is to take advantage of the fact that a cause must precede its effect. Studies that assess education at Time 1 and wealth at Time 2, holding all else constant, suggest that investing in education really does make countries richer. At least it does if the education is secular and rationalistic. Until the 20th century, Spain was an economic laggard among Western countries, even though Spaniards were highly schooled, because Spanish education was controlled by the Catholic Church, and “the children of the masses received only oral instruction in the Creed, the catechism, and a few simple manual skills. . . . Science, mathematics, political economy, and secular history were considered too controversial for anyone but trained theologians.”6 Clerical meddling has similarly been blamed for the economic lag of parts of the Arab world today.7

  At the more spiritual end of the range, education brings gifts that go well beyond practical know-how and economic growth: better education today makes a country more democratic and peaceful tomorrow.8 The wide-ranging effects of education make it hard to discern the intervening links in the causal chain from formal schooling to social harmony. Some of the links may simply be demographic and economic. Better-educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men.9 And better-educated countries are richer, and as we saw in chapters 11 and 14, richer countries tend to be more peaceful and democratic.

  But some of the causal pathways vindicate the values of the Enlightenment. So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them.

  Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.13

  For all these reasons, the growth of education—and its first dividend, literacy—is a flagship of human progress. And as with so many other dimensions of progress, we see a familiar narrative: until the Enlightenment, almost everyone was abject; then, a few countries started to pull away from the pack; recently, the rest of the world has been catching up; soon, the bounty will be near-universal. Figure 16-1 shows that before the 17th century, literacy was the privilege of a small elite in Western Europe, less than an eighth of the population, and that was true for the world as a whole well into the 19th century. The world’s literacy rate doubled in the next century and quadrupled in the century after that, so now 83 percent of the world is literate. Even that figure understates the literatization of the world, because the illiterate fifth is mostly middle-aged or elderly. In many Middle Eastern and North African countries, more than three-quarters of the people over sixty-five are illiterate, whereas the rate for those in their teens and twenties is in the single digits.14 The literacy rate for young adults (aged fifteen to twenty-four) in 2010 was 91 percent—about the same as for the entire population of the United States in 1910.15 Not surprisingly, the lowest rates of literacy are found in the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries, such as South Sudan (32 percent), Central African Republic (37 percent), and Afghanistan (38 percent).16

  Figure 16-1: Literacy, 1475–2010

  Source: Our World in Data, Roser & Ortiz-Ospina 2016b, including data from the following. Bef
ore 1800: Buringh & Van Zanden 2009. World: van Zanden et al. 2014. US: National Center for Education Statistics. After 2000: Central Intelligence Agency 2016.

  Literacy is the foundation for the rest of education, and figure 16-2 shows the world’s progress in sending children to school.17 The time line is familiar: in 1820, more than 80 percent of the world was unschooled; by 1900, a large majority of Western Europe and the Anglosphere had the benefit of a basic education; today, that’s true of more than 80 percent of the world. The least fortunate region, sub-Saharan Africa, has a rate comparable to that of the world in 1980, Latin America in 1970, East Asia in the 1960s, Eastern Europe in 1930, and Western Europe in 1880. According to current projections, by the middle of this century, only five countries will have more than a fifth of their population uneducated, and by the end of the century the worldwide proportion will fall to zero.18

  Figure 16-2: Basic education, 1820–2010

  Source: Our World in Data, Roser & Nagdy 2016c, based on data from van Zanden et al. 2014. The graphs indicate the share of the population aged 15 or older that had completed at least a year of education (more in later eras); see van Leeuwen & van Leewen-Li 2014, pp. 88–93.

  “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”19 Unlike measures of well-being that have a natural floor of zero, like war and disease, or a natural ceiling of a hundred percent, like nutrition and literacy, the quest for knowledge is unbounded. Not only does knowledge itself expand indefinitely, but the premium for knowledge in an economy that is driven by technology has been soaring.20 While global rates of literacy and basic education are converging to their natural ceiling, the number of years of schooling, extending into tertiary and postgraduate education in colleges and universities, continues to grow in every country. In 1920, just 28 percent of American teenagers between fourteen and seventeen were in high school; by 1930, the proportion had grown to almost half, and by 2011, 80 percent graduated, of whom almost 70 percent went on to college.21 In 1940, less than 5 percent of Americans held a bachelor’s degree; by 2015, almost a third did.22 Figure 16-3 shows the parallel trajectories of the length of schooling in a sample of countries, with recent highs ranging from four years in Sierra Leone to thirteen years (some college) in the United States. According to one projection, by the end of the century more than 90 percent of the world’s population will have some secondary education, and 40 percent some college.23 Since educated people tend to have fewer children, the growth of education is a major reason that, later in this century, world population is expected to peak and then decline (figure 10-1).