Education since 1820

Education provides many direct and indirect benefits to people’s well-being. This chapter relies upon two indicators to describe educational inequalities around the globe since 1820: literacy rates and years of schooling. These indicators are based on merging two major datasets that rely mainly on population census data, and that have various strengths and limitations. The chapter shows that trends in education have a tight relationship with those in GDP per capita. In 1820, less than 20% of the world’s population was literate, and this group was heavily concentrated in Western Europe and the Western Offshoots. Nowadays, levels of literacy are close to 100% almost everywhere, with Africa being the most significant exception (at 64%). In the wake of the expansion of basic education, secondary and tertiary education also expanded in all parts of the world, first in the Western Offshoots, then in Western Europe. More recently this became a global phenomenon, resulting in a strong increase in the average years of education of the world population, from around 1 year in 1870, to 3 years after the Second World War, to more than 7 years in the new millennium.