The Danger of What We're Doing

When education is framed as the answer to all the ills of a country and the principal means for its development, the consequences can be devastating. This commentary on the recent riots in Tunisia and Algeria gets it just about right, I think.

Societies on both sides of the Mediterranean suffer from what one might call diplomatosis. This dangerous disease is caused by the assumption that, since a modern economy requires educated people, the more educated people it can call upon—as measured by the average number of years in school—the more productive that economy will be. On this view, education is in itself the motor of growth, and the demand for educated labor will automatically keep up with, if not outstrip, the supply.

The story of the young Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi, whose suicidal self-immolation was the spark that set Tunisia aflame, is instructive. He was 26 and had a degree in computer science. Like 200,000 other university graduates in Tunisia (in a population of 10 million), he could not find a job. He then tried selling fruits and vegetables from a stall. However, he did not have bureaucratic permission to do this—such permission being bestowed by other university graduates, lucky or well-connected enough to have found jobs in the public-sector bureaucracy. The police constantly harassed him because he didn’t have the requisite licenses. It is said that he set fire to himself when a policeman spat in his face.

No policy could be more dangerous, more certain ultimately to produce a social explosion, than to educate young people for many years and deny them first the opportunity to earn a living that they believe is commensurate with their education, and then the opportunity to earn a living at all. But this is the policy that many countries persist in following on both sides of the Mediterranean.

Our hope is to frame the importance of education in more humanistic terms regarding the development of the person. I hope this will bear fruit re: integration rather than the alienation that is beginning to be apparent even here.