By Martha Simmons
Correspondent, The Alabama Baptist
Nearly 1 in 5 adults worldwide has no formal schooling, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. What does that have to do with religion? Plenty.
The global demographic study explored educational attainment levels and their relationship to major religious groups and reported in December 2016 that “Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world, while Muslims and Hindus tend to have the fewest years of formal schooling.”
At 13.4 years, Jews’ level of formal schooling is nearly double that of 7.7 years achieved by the average adult worldwide. Christians around the globe average 9.3 years, religiously unaffiliated 8.8 years, Buddhists 7.9 years, Muslims and Hindus 5.6 years.
“These gaps in educational attainment are partly a function of where religious groups are concentrated throughout the world,” Pew researchers said. “For instance the vast majority of the world’s Jews live in the United States and Israel — two economically developed countries with high levels of education overall. And low levels of attainment among Hindus reflect the fact that 98 percent of Hindu adults live in the developing countries of India, Nepal and Bangladesh.”
Marked differences
Pew researchers noted, however, that there also are marked differences in educational attainment among religious groups living in some regions or countries. “In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Christians generally have higher average levels of education than Muslims,” researchers found. “Some social scientists have attributed this gap primarily to historical factors, including missionary activity during colonial times.”
In the U.S. religious minorities are more likely to have college degrees than the Christian majority, researchers said. Pew reports these percentages of U.S. groups who possess a higher education:
Hindus — 96 percent
Jews — 75 percent
Muslims — 54 percent
Buddhists — 53 percent
Religiously unaffiliated — 44 percent
Christians — 36 percent
Baptist educator Chris McCaghren cautioned against viewing such statistics in isolation without contemplating all the factors related to achievement.
“It’s a false narrative to say that one group in the U.S. is less educated than other groups,” said McCaghren, vice president of academic affairs at the University of Mobile (UM).
It is not surprising that a comparatively much smaller number of people in minority religious groups, accustomed to overcoming financial, logistical and other barriers, might achieve education at a higher rate than the much larger population of U.S. Christians, McCaghren suggested. “There are always going to be confounding variables” not reflected in the data, he said.
Still there is much to celebrate in the achievement numbers reported by Pew.
“It is a blessing to see the gender gap is closing worldwide,” McCaghren said. Women’s advances in higher education in the U.S. is particularly reflected in enrollment numbers at UM, where women outnumber men at a rate of 65 percent to 35 percent.
According to Pew’s study, drawing on census and survey data from 151 countries, large gender gaps in educational attainment remain within some major world religions. “For example Muslim women around the globe have an average of 4.9 years of schooling, compared with 6.4 years among Muslim men. And formal education is especially low among Hindu women, who have 4.2 years of schooling on average, compared with 6.9 years among Hindu men.”
But even those gender gaps are narrowing over time, Pew reports, and Jews, Christians and religiously unaffiliated adults have seen reversals in the gender gap in many areas throughout the world with women equal to or outpacing men in college enrollment.
Both religion and region matter when it comes to schooling, Pew researchers reported.
“Christians have remained fairly stable at the global level in their overall educational attainment over three generations. But their attainment varies considerably by region. As the largest of the world’s major religious groups (numbering about 2.2 billion overall including children as of 2010), Christians also are the most widely dispersed faith group with hundreds of millions of adherents in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean. Christians in Europe and North America tend to be much more highly educated than those in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, although African Christians are making rapid educational gains across generations.”
McCaghren sees these statistics as a call to action.
“If we think of higher education as a missions field, there’s a lot of global opportunity,” McCaghren said. “Education, at least in my study of Baptist history, has always been integral to developing an infrastructure for the spreading of the gospel.
“We do the very same thing today that they did at Harvard in 1636, we just have a broader emphasis,” he said. “Part of our mission here at University of Mobile, part of the mission at Samford University, part of the mission at Judson College, is to train folks up and to prepare them for Kingdom work, whether that be in the pulpit, on the missions field, leading worship on Sunday mornings or working with youth.”
Heart knowledge
“We talk a lot about head transformation and heart transformation,” McCaghren said. “So we want to give them the knowledge to succeed in any variety of careers that they choose, but it’s that heart knowledge, that gospel transformation that we really look at as our most important task here at University of Mobile. We take that calling very seriously.
“In terms of preparing folks to go out and reach the four corners of the globe,” he said, “we will begin to have an increased emphasis on international programs, a chance for students to interact with some of these groups and cultures that are mentioned in their studies and more emphasis on that kind of cultural engagement in our curriculum as well.
“Education is ingrained in who we are as Baptists,” McCaghren said. “And it has been throughout our entire history.”
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