The Education of Nations

Mass education is vital to sustainable development particularly in the information age. In The Education of Nations Stephen Kosack provides a framework for understanding when a government will invest in quality mass education or concentrate on higher education restricted to elites. Drawing on detailed evidence from more than five decades in Taiwan Ghana and Brazil - three countries with little in common - Kosack demonstrates that two conditions lead developing nations to invest in mass education. The first of these is an economy in which employers face a shortage of skilled labor that they cannot meet with outsourcing or by hiring foreign workers; the second and more common is a government engaging in political entrepreneurship of the poor - developing organizational structures that allow poor citizens to act collectively to support the government. In bringing these conditions to light The Education of Nations provides a method to explain not only how governments try to distribute educational opportunity but also the implications for a range of key features of actual education systems from the relative conditions of schools to the availability of financial aid. In an era when much of a country''s success depends on its education this book explains why governments adopt particular education policies and the political and economic changes that would lead to different ones.