To whom much has been given

The most recent "classical revival" book in my lap is E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. One must wonder how many of the world's current ills might have been avoided if the practical development advice in this book had become the norm in 1973. Nevertheless, I quote here not from a what might have been mindset, but from a passage that remains as relevant today for myself and many others who have been blessed by the American educational system. After noting that in China it took something like 150 peasant-work-years to support a person through five years of college, Schumacher wonders aloud

Is education to be a "passport to privilege" or is it something which people take upon themselves almost like a monastic vow, a sacred obligation to serve the people? . . . . As a Christian, I may be permitted to quote from St. Luke: "Much will be expected of the man to whom much has been given. More will be asked of him because he was entrusted with more." It is, you might well say, an elementary matter of justice.

If this ideology does not prevail, if it is taken for granted that education is a passport to privilege, then the content of education will not primarily be something to serve the people, but something to serve ourselves, the educated. The privileged minority will wish to be educated in a manner that sets them apart and will inevitably learn and teach the wrong things, that is to say, things that do set them apart, with a contempt for manual labour, a contempt for primary production, a contempt for rural life, etc., etc. Unless virtually all educated people see themselves as servants of their country---and that means after all as servants of the common people---there cannot possibly be enough leadership and enough communication of know-how to solve this problem of unemployment or unproductive employment in the half million villages of India.