“The importance of foundational skills:
There is a mountain of evidence on the benefits of education. For individuals and families, education leads to higher productivity and earnings, poverty reduction, higher rates of employment, better health outcomes, and greater civic engagement. For societies, education contributes to faster innovation and growth, better-functioning institutions, greater intergenerational social mobility, higher levels of social trust, and a lower likelihood of conflict.
We now are aware that foundational skills such as basic literacy and numeracy are important drivers of these benefits. Common sense tells us that many of these benefits of education stem not from the number of years a student spends sitting in the classroom, but from the learning or skills that a student acquires. And increasingly, research is substantiating this intuition. The level of skills in a society predicts economic growth better than the level of schooling does.
Learning contributes to intergenerational social mobility in a society too: children in communities with better schools have higher earnings.”
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