Rather, people know a different set of skills and accumulate a different body of knowledge. It is only if we define "education" as the degree of knowledge in the body of subjects we teach today that one can say people in the past had less of it. But that's only because we have discarded the many bodies of knowledge an educated person needed to have in the past.
For example, one can laugh and say that to earn a doctorate in mathematics during the renaissance you'd need to know algebra only to the level of solving a cubic equation. However you are missing all the archaic geometric ruler and compass constructions, evaluation of various infinite series, and deep knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, German texts, mastery of rhetoric, music theory, and other topics that few learn today. So it is not true that a mathematician of the present could waltz in and get a Doctorate in Philosophy in medieval Paris. He would probably get quickly thrown out for failing to master the many various scholastic topics that were required of a PhD in that time period, and which no one learns today.
As another example, a new worker in 1800 might be expected to know how to deliver a calf, fix a fence, shod a horse, make homemade preserves, skin a rabbit, set a broken bone, paint a barn, as well as know Greek, geography, history, recite the speeches of Cicero, translate the Odes of Horace, navigate the seas by an astrolabe, stain a bookcase, identify the key flood valleys of Europe and know which animals could be hunted in which part of the year in various European forests, or know the biographies of German princes, etc. But you are correct, they wouldn't have MS Office skills or know how to create a webapp.
Once you move past "hunter-gatherer", you very quickly run into complex societies with their own historically developed bodies of knowledge that require lifetime learning, whether that means learning the seasons and details about planting crops and irrigating fields, dealing with pests, where to dig a well, how to tan leather, etc - or whether that means something else, it is still a vast body of knowledge that takes decades to master. The point is, wherever a society is technologically, it will choose different areas to train its workers, and omit other areas that are no longer needed. But how many resources does a society need to train its workers? If that number keeps growing, then there is something wrong with the society.
Yes, but this is increasingly knowledge that needs to be imparted through formal education (for a variety of reasons). Hence it costs more.
>But how many resources does a society need to train its workers? If that number keeps growing, then there is something wrong with the society.
I don't see the logic here. It's fine as long as you can afford it.
>as well as know Greek
Only a tiny minority of the working population could read Ancient Greek in Europe in 1800. In England, around 50% of the population were still entirely illiterate at that point in time.
Surely that can't be true? Here in Sweden literacy was made mandatory for adults in 1686. It was not permitted to get married without being able to read.
Surely England can't have been that far behind, as late as 1800ed?
