Humanity has built an extraordinary system for producing and sharing knowledge, yet many people still lack a broad understanding of the systems shaping their lives. That gap is becoming a democratic dilemma.
We live in what is routinely called the knowledge economy. Humanity has never produced, stored or had access to so much knowledge. Yet here is an uncomfortable question: how much does the average person actually know about the world in which they live?
Imagine a scale from zero to 10. Zero represents virtually complete ignorance. Ten represents something approaching comprehensive and expert knowledge across the fundamentals of philosophy, history, geography, science, politics, economics, law, culture, technology and the environment.
Nobody would score 10. Human knowledge has become far too extensive for any individual to master. But where would the world’s more than eight billion people sit?
My first instinct was provocative: perhaps around 80 per cent of humanity would score only about one. That is almost certainly too severe. But modify the proposition and it becomes harder to dismiss. Perhaps 70 or 80 per cent of humanity would fall somewhere between one and three, with the global median around two or three.
We cannot know precisely because, remarkably, we do not seriously measure it. Governments measure GDP, inflation, employment, productivity, school attendance and educational qualifications. International organisations test literacy, numeracy and aspects of science. But there is no serious global measure of whether human beings possess a broadly integrated understanding of the civilisation or the capitalism they inhabit. And that is quite different from asking whether they can read.
The achievement of mass education is nevertheless extraordinary. UNESCO estimates that around 87 per cent of adults worldwide are literate. But this still leaves about 739 million adults without basic literacy skills. Some 273 million children and young people remain out of school.
More troublingly, attending school does not necessarily mean acquiring even basic competencies. The World Bank estimated after the pandemic that around 70 per cent of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries could not read and understand a simple age-appropriate text. Nor is this simply a problem of poorer countries. PISA testing repeatedly demonstrates substantial weaknesses in literacy, numeracy and science among students in some of the richest and most highly educated societies. But even these measures barely touch the question I am asking.
How many people could give a reasonable account of human evolution? Explain the greenhouse effect? Locate the world’s major countries and oceans? Describe why the First World War happened? Explain the Enlightenment, colonialism or the Industrial Revolution? How many understand the difference between capitalism and socialism, between parliament and government, between a constitution and ordinary legislation? How many understand how banks create credit, what government debt actually is, how corporations work, why ecosystems collapse or how scientific knowledge is distinguished from opinion? None of these questions requires a doctorate. Together they constitute something more fundamental: knowledge of the world.
Here we encounter one of the great paradoxes of modern civilisation. Humanity spends an enormous amount educating itself. UNESCO estimates that governments, households and international donors were spending about US$5.8 trillion annually on education by 2022, a figure approaching 6 per cent of world GDP. Today the figure is probably comfortably above US$6 trillion.
Think about what this means. Humanity devotes roughly one dollar in every 18 it produces to education. Tens of millions of teachers and academics work in hundreds of thousands of schools, colleges and universities. Billions of people spend 12, 15 or 20 of their formative years being formally educated.
We have constructed perhaps the largest knowledge-transmission system in human history. Yet we may still have produced an economic and social world in which most people understand only fragments of how that civilisation works.
The explanation is not that people are stupid. Nor should the argument become an exercise in intellectual elitism. Someone who left school at 14 may understand society more deeply than someone possessing several university degrees.
The problem lies partly in what education has become. Modern mass education developed not simply to create knowledgeable citizens but to produce the workers required by increasingly complex economies. Industrial capitalism needed literacy, numeracy, punctuality and discipline. Contemporary capitalism requires increasingly sophisticated specialisation.
Universities have become exceptionally successful at producing specialists. We consequently have brilliant cardiologists who may know little economics; economists who know little ecology; lawyers who know little science; engineers who know little history; computer scientists who have never seriously encountered philosophy; and politicians required to make decisions spanning all of them. We increasingly know more and more about less and less.
Meanwhile the problems confronting humanity are moving in precisely the opposite direction. They are becoming more interconnected. Climate change is simultaneously scientific, economic, political, technological and ethical. Artificial intelligence raises questions about computer science, employment, ownership, inequality, law, democracy and human identity. War involves history, geography, economics, technology, nationalism and psychology.
Capitalism itself cannot properly be understood through economics alone. It is simultaneously an economic system, a structure of ownership and power, a political order, an ecological force and a historical phenomenon. Specialised knowledge is indispensable. But specialisation without synthesis leaves us extraordinarily knowledgeable within particular silos and surprisingly ignorant outside them.
And now another transformation has arrived. For most of human history information was scarce. Books were expensive. Libraries were inaccessible to most people. Education was restricted to minorities. Today billions of human beings carry in their pockets devices capable of accessing almost the entire accumulated store of human knowledge. The scarcity has shifted. We no longer primarily lack information. We lack the time, education, intellectual frameworks and sometimes the inclination required to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into understanding.
Indeed, the information revolution may be making the problem worse. The same smartphone that provides access to Shakespeare, Darwin, Marx, Einstein and the accumulated knowledge of the world’s universities also delivers TikTok, advertising, conspiracy theories, celebrity gossip and political propaganda, all competing for the same finite human attention.
Artificial intelligence takes the contradiction another step further. Humanity is constructing machines capable of navigating enormous bodies of knowledge at precisely the moment when many humans appear to be outsourcing some of the effort previously required to acquire knowledge themselves.
This matters profoundly for democracy. Democracy does not require every citizen to become an expert. But it does depend upon citizens possessing sufficient knowledge to make judgements about competing claims and competing futures.
Yet voters are being asked to decide governments responsible for nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, financial systems, climate change and enormously complicated economies while political communication is increasingly reduced to slogans, memes, 30-second videos and algorithmically targeted emotional messages. There is something fundamentally dangerous about that combination.
Perhaps we therefore need to rethink what education is for. Preparing people for employment is important. But education should also prepare people for citizenship, civilisation and life. History gives us memory. Geography locates us in the world. Science gives us methods for distinguishing evidence from assertion. Philosophy teaches us to question assumptions. Political economy exposes relationships between wealth and power. Law explains how authority is organised. Ecology reminds us that every economy ultimately operates inside the biosphere. Separately these are subjects. Together they constitute the beginnings of understanding.
Humanity has accomplished something magnificent over the past two centuries. We have moved from societies in which education was largely the privilege of elites towards the possibility of universal education. The next revolution should be more ambitious. It should seek not simply universal schooling but universal understanding: creating citizens capable of seeing connections between history, science, economics, politics, culture and nature.
For therein lies perhaps the strangest contradiction of the knowledge age. We have accumulated more knowledge than every previous civilisation combined. We spend trillions every year producing and transmitting it. Almost all of it can increasingly be accessed instantly from a device held in the palm of a hand.
And yet much of humanity may understand surprisingly little about the structures and systems governing its existence. Knowledge has become abundant. Understanding remains scarce. Closing that gap is one of the great democratic challenges of the 21st century.
Stewart Sweeney
Stewart Sweeney is a writer and public policy advocate with a longstanding interest in the evolution and future of capitalism. He migrated from Scotland to Adelaide in 1975 to work with Premier Don Dunstan on industrial democracy. A former academic and trade unionist, he continues to contribute to public debate on economic justice, democratic reform, and sustainable development. His work reflects a deep commitment to the common good and the role of public purpose in shaping Australia’s future.