ABSTRACT
In every civilized society education is widely recognized to be something of very great value. By many people it is recognized to be something abundantly worth pursuing for its own sake. By still more people it is seen as a cornucopia from which all kinds of benefit, private and public, may be made to flow: some see in education the path to personal economic and social advancement, the ladder to a higher income or at least to higher status, while others see in it a powerful lever of social change or perhaps an essential stabilizing force giving massive support to the maintenance and transmission of the established order of things. Whatever special value is attached to education by particular individuals or groups, however, one fact is obvious to all. It is inescapably obvious that the level of education which people actually attain is something which in every society varies considerably—in some societies, enormously—from individual to individual and from social group to social group. In every society, as well as people who are rightly thought of as highly educated or reasonably well educated (in terms of the general educational standards of the society in question) there are usually large numbers of people who are rightly regarded as quite poorly educated and many others whose level of education is so low that (in terms of prevailing standards) it is often considered reasonable to refer to them simply as 'uneducated'.
