Why Would They Do That? Discouraging Formal Education
A recent question on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange has caught a lot of attention: Why would a government passively encourage its people not to obtain a formal education? The question describes a city that, for plot reasons, needs to discourage people from using schools, so they levy a tax and as a result most people home-school, or a family pays to send one person to school so that person can then come back and teach others. It’s not unusual for formal education to be out of reach of most people; we have plenty of examples of that from our own world. But this question instead posits that there’s a reason, beyond “everyone’s poor”. What could motivate a government to do that?
An answer from Pavel Janicek suggests a power-grab: less-educated people are easier for those in power to manipulate, and those in government want to hold onto their power, so they decide to keep everybody down. It’s a long-term plan, but in time the government gains support and reduces opposition. Pavel doesn’t suggest it, but in such an environment, a government can be helped even more by finding ways to foment anti-intellectualism: not only do you not need schools, but if you waste your time there and fill your head with nonsense like philosophy instead of doing productive work, you’re taking advantage. Bottom line: a government might have this policy because it’s evil.
In another answer new user lzl carries job progression to its logical conclusion. Already, today, a lot of low-end jobs have been automated away; in time “knowledge” jobs could be largely deprecated too in favor of artificial intelligence. Why take the risk of having fickle, emotional, unreliable humans performing jobs that AIs can do? It’s far safer for society if most people spend their days playing Angry Birds. (This is presumably in a post-scarcity world, where everybody’s basic needs are met without the need for employment.) Educate enough people to keep the machines running and distract everybody else.
At the other end of the jobs spectrum, Andreas Hartmann suggests that the government needs the manpower — it needs its people to be producing food or fighting wars or some other task that requires major manpower, jobs where education and ingenuity get in the way.
Many of the answers look for negative reasons, and the evil-government power-grab idea resonates with a lot of people. In my answer I took a different approach, positing a government that wants to promote certain family or religious values. In this scenario leaders aren’t being evil or addressing a need (like manpower); they honestly feel that it is better for people not to go to formal schools. Why might that be? I list a few possibilities that a worldbuilder could develop — education is a core parental responsibility and outsourcing it is considered Wrong; education should be wholly integrated into family life, not be something you spend a block of time doing each day in a classroom; individual or small-group tutoring provides a superior education. People home-school today when public schools are available; the reasons they have could be held more widely in another society.
There are several answers based in economics, addressing the costs of running an education system or the need for those funds elsewhere or reversing “eduflation” (education inflation) by using fees to make education valuable. At this writing 18 people have offered answers; check it out.
