The Educationalization of the ModernWorld: Progress, Passion, and the Protestant Promise of Education

Abstract

In the foreword to his very last World Development Report by the World Bank Group in 2007, World Bank Group President Paul Wolfowitz (2006) reminds readers that the Bank’s overarching mission is to fight poverty throughout the world. A core task in this fight is to invest in young people, more precisely in their education. Never before, Wolfowitz asserts, has the time been better to invest in young people, because never before in history has the number of people worldwide aged 12–24 years been larger, and never before have young people been as healthy and well educated as today. Because of falling fertility, the need for this investment has become even more urgent, since the aging of societies will cause tremendous social, economic, and political challenges in the near future. In order to avoid the fundamental problems of aging societies, it is necessary to raise the share of the population that is working and to boost household savings. After all, Wolfowitz reminds the readers, the young people of today are “tomorrow’s workers, entrepreneurs, parents, active citizens, and, indeed, leaders” (Wolfowitz, 2006, p. xi). At least two discursive patterns in this Foreword by Wolfowitz might catch our attention. First, we might note the rhetorical trick that reformers always use by urging that ‘never before’ has such and such been the case and that it is most important ‘especially today’ to think or act in this or another way. The seriousness or even tragedy of the present is presented as an indisputable fact. However, despite the fact that the alleged appraisal of the present can only be read as historical argument, it is not based on any historical investigation at all but instead appeals to general sentiments that people have had forever as they deal with everyday life and strive for certainty. According to John Dewey’s (1929) Gifford Lectures, The Quest for Certainty, this striving is the fundament on which people construct dualistic worldviews, praising religiously the intelligible eternal world and being sceptical toward the contingent empirical world.