The eradication of illiteracy throughout the world is an ongoing endeavor and a noble one. However, in countries where the vast majority of the population can now read and write, those populations did not, as the German poet-essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger once said, learn to do so "because they felt like it, but because they were forced to."

This point may sound academic, but in light of the current "crisis" in education it's one that warrants consideration. In every industrialized country, the state says that everyone must go to school, and it educates its citizenry in a way that benefits the state. In other words, an ideal -- universal education -- that emerged during the Enlightenment as a means of liberating people from suffering ended up becoming a means to build a workforce.

Nowadays, the economies of the industrialized world are focused not on production but on markets, which means an educated workforce is becoming increasingly redundant. The purpose of education is no longer clear. Political leaders make grand statements about not wasting a single young mind while in the background school budgets are cut to the bone and parents turn desperate about their children's "competitiveness."