Lack of education

The recent events in Egypt tell us a lot, not necessarily about the Egyptian people, but about ourselves. The first step in self-recognition is your own "opinion" about what's happening there. For the moment, I don't care whether you're for or against, think it's a good idea or bad. What I would be more interested in, though, is how you would use the words "freedom" and "education" in your arguments. An unlikely pair in this context, I know, but they belong together nevertheless.

The first thing that the two words have in common is that they have no universally accepted definitions, and I'm not talking about their other-language equivalents, though that too shows an endless variety. No, I'm simply talking about all of us who speak the same language ... allegedly. I've kick around the "freedom" concept on more than one occasion, so I'm not going to go over all that again here. Instead, I want to look at the role education plays in all this, for, after all, I have been going on a bit about education lately.

Ever since Jefferson, the accepted wisdom has been that a well-educated populace is essential to the proper functioning of a democracy. When we look at literacy rates, for example, that is, the proportion of the people who can read and write, we find that it still varies considerably, even 500+ years after Gutenberg (all values rounded to whole percentages):

Country	Overall	Males	Females
United States	99%	99%	99%
Germany	99%	99%	99%
Egypt	72%	80%	63%
Saudi Arabia	87%	90%	81%
Syria	80%	86%	74%
West Bank	96%	98%	93%

Now before anyone gets the idea that I'm picking on the Middle East, I would like to point out that Saudi has a relatively high literacy rate, but is not a democracy, nor is Syria, but there is something of an intuitive correlation between literacy rate and stability on the one hand. Egypt is striving -- uneasily, I'll admit -- toward self-determination, but if there is anything to Jefferson's notion of what's required, they certainly have a long way to go.

Granted, literacy rates are one, rather limited, way of approaching the issue, so next time, we'll dig a bit deeper.