Social Institutions and Behavioral Change
Educational progress relies less directly on inexorable technological advance and more on social institutions and behavioral change.
From Robert Putnam's The Upswing:
The high school revolution was fostered by the "high school movement" in the early 1900s and was marked by the creation of free public high schools, beginning in small towns of the West and Midwest, then spreading to urban areas across the North, and finally throughout the entire country. . . .
This remarkably successful institutional innovation led both to a massive increase in the productivity of American workers (thus accounting for the lion's share of overall economic growth in this period) and to an increase in upward mobility, because universal high school education leveled the playing field. Economic growth and social equality moved steadily upward in tandem, contrary to some presumptions that equality and growth are incompatible. As the Sixties opened, no end of that educational, economic, and social progress was in sight. Then, however . . . suddenly America took its foot off the educational gas pedal and began coasting (and even slowing), initiating a surprising pause in high school expansion that would last for more than four decades.
In the first three quarters of the twentieth century the fraction of all young Americans with college degrees rose at an accelerating pace from 3 percent to 22 percent. Then, in 1975, roughly a decade after the "foot off the gas" pause in high school graduation rates, a similar pause of almost two decades interrupted the century-long progress in college graduation rates. Not until the end of the twentieth century did measures of educational attainment resume growth.
In sum . . . educational gauges show marked advancement over more than a century, but unlike the indicators of material and physical well-being, educational progress has not been entirely uninterrupted, perhaps in part because—unlike material and medical progress—educational progress relies less directly on inexorable technological advance and more on social institutions and behavioral change.
