ioral.* For example, our assumptions and assessments regarding environmental disasters commonly misconstrue their causes, externalizing them in nature rather than internalizing them in misguided intentions and unrealistic expectations (1999:8). Caldwell's proposed responses to his environmental concerns are four: evaluation of major social-environmental trends, universalizing an ethic of environmental stewardship and sustainability, persuasion through communication, and leadership in the formulation and explication of public policy. Caldwell quotes Kagan ( 1991:169): Any successful society must be an educational institution. We offer a hypothesis: educating well all of the world's children from the age of 6 through 16 would promote all four of the responses Caldwell proposes, would go a long way toward reducing or ameliorating the driving forces of the environmental situation that Caldwell identifies, and would have many other private and social benefits as well. As of 1995, about 1.25 billion children in the world were aged 6 to 16 years old, inclusive (United Nations, 1998). Of this population, about 175 million lived in the more-developed countries (Northern America, Japan, Europe, Australia and New Zealand). About 1.07 billion lived in the less-developed regions (all of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Asia excluding Japan). Of those school-age children in the less-developed countries, about 164 million lived in the 48 least-developed countries as defined in 1998 by the United Nations General Assembly. According to the medium projection of United Nations Population Division (1998), the school-age population will not change much in total size in the next half-century but will shift dramatically between regions. The school-age population in the more-developed countries is expected to drop by 24% between 1995 and 2050, while the school-age population in the least-developed countries is expected to increase by 71 % between 1995 and 2030 (see Figure 1). It is difficult to estimate how many school-age children are being educated well, whether in a formal school or otherwise. Summary statistics on primary school enrollment are available (Williams, 1997:122), but enrollment is an unreliable surrogate for the number of children who are receiving an education of high quality. Late in the twentieth century, about three-quarters of the children eligible to attend primary schools in developing countries did so. The 130 million children who were out of school were disproportionately girls, and were mainly illiterate (Colclough and Lewin, 1993). A much smaller fraction of secondary school-age students are enrolled in school or receiving other education.