The world is easily diced and sliced. There's the digital divide, the gender gap, the haves and the have-nots. Whether we like it or not, the world is also beginning to be split another way. There are the understands, and the understand-nots. It's an epistemic divide. Some people - phrased loosely - understand how the world works, and others don't. It hasn't happened much yet, but, as our world becomes more and more complex, the gap between the understands and the understand-nots will only grow.
Hang on. How the world works? The whole world? Everything? Not really. My point is not that there is some set of people who understand everything, and another set that don't. Rather, my point is that being able to keep up with the increasing rate of social and technological change in the world requires a certain skill set. Not everyone has that skill set, and those people are falling further and further behind.
This points to a solution, but some simple examples first that illustrate the problem. Consider the retired demographic. How many of them are comfortable using a computer? How many can take advantage of the special economic efficiencies online deals offer buyers and sellers? How many don't have information at their fingertips, but have to wait for tomorrow's newspaper or the evening's weather report? When you're used to being able to get an up to date time table for the trains with just a few clicks of the mouse it's easy to forget the opportunity cost that comes from losing a few minutes or a few pennies, here and there, all the time, every day. This is a change. It used to be that the older you were the more informationally equipped you were to face the world.
And consider social networking applications like LinkedIn and Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. They keep the (usually young) world-spanning professional in touch with friends across all time zones and make the benefits of a global social and professional network so easy to access. Those who don't use them or don't understand them miss out.
Age-related examples are the easiest to come by, but it's much broader than that. You might be under 30, like me, but how many of your friends, proudly or otherwise, describe themselves as technophobes? How many quail at the thought that they might have to describe something numerically? Or read and mentally summarise a 30 page white paper? Can you estimate just how much arithmophobia and literophobia cost, invisibly and financially or otherwise? So far it's not much and we don't notice it precisely because it is not much, but pennies make pounds and if change accelerates the pennies will become pounds anyway.
In short, almost anyone from any background risks falling on the wrong side of the epistemic divide, with all the costs that carries. This is especially the case if things continue to change faster and faster. Will they? That claim is not without debate, but the general consensus of physical and social scientists (von Neumann, Hawkins, Smart) is that change is accelerating. Science fiction authors agree. Thirty years ago it wasn't science fiction if it happened in less than a millennium. Today, Hugo award winning novels find themselves bogged down after less than two decades. We aren't even ready for the same old rate of change, and we face a changing, accelerating rate of change.
In many respects, being on the wrong side of the epistemic divide will be like being on the wrong side of the economic divide. It won't be fatal. In a modern society everyone should be able to maintain a basic standard of living. A man wearing a steel ball and chain won't win the 100 metre dash, but he'll finish it eventually. He won't be able to help anyone else though, and will probably need our help along the way. So it is with the epistemic divide. As a society, we have a choice. We can pay the cost of preventing the problem, or pay the much greater cost of fixing it later on.
That then is the solution: we must help people unlock their balls and chains. Our education system can't just teach people knowledge; it must also teach them how to learn, and how to learn anything, with no exceptions. “I don't understand computers”, “I'm not a maths person” and “I don't like reading” will become less and less tenable, because all are essential. For the same reason, continuing education will become more and more important, and it must become more and more accessible. It will help people cross to the right side of the divide, and help those on the right side stay there. Because it's less a divide and more a constantly rising tide. Which means that we need to rethink the goals and nature of education. It cannot be something that you do and finish and forget about. Education must become an increasingly central and continuous component of our lives, in all areas of our lives. The human, financial, and social cost of doing otherwise is just too high.