let's continue this back-and-forth in good spirit as we have been doing. hehe " May not be a prerequisite, but if you want democracy to work, yes..." - Democracy CAN work without a wholesale educated mass. Democracy does not work in the presence of asymmetries in power. This power can derive from a lot of different things, but one important component IS education. Without the guarantees of equal access to education and educational attainment, efforts to promote education just distorts the power structure of the society - creating an asymmetrical power structure deriving from none other than education - which works in favor of non-democracy and non-freedom. (Again, my freedom leads to freedom hypothesis - without freedom, education does not guarantee the achievement of freedom.) I will give you the example of India. Now, I know most of our impression of India is shaped by the observation of our immediate neighbors - Bihar, UP and the like - which are arguably the most under-developed places in India. However, if we are willing to look beyond these states, we see a vibrant country that has done well under democracy. Sure, the economic progress did not come until the last decade of the twentieth century. The democratic polity, and policies motivated by national pride, was able to produce a huge number of engineers and doctors, and many of them wasted their lives driving taxis etc. to make a living until the 1990s. In this scenario, the economic achievement of India was impinged not by the lack of an educated mass, but by the lack of freedom to associate with people from outside India. Once the restrictive, inward-looking economic policies were reversed in the late 1980s, i.e. freedom (and indeed, this is a dimension of freedom) was restored, economic progress was not only imaginable but also tangible.