[indigo945]

You're grossly underestimating the level of education in Mongolia. Until the IMF-mandated austerity policies of the 90's, during which so many schools closed that many families couldn't even send their children to primary school anymore, and the remaining schools had to close in winter because they couldn't afford heating, Mongolia did not only have near-total literacy, but also one of the highest rates of tertiary education, that is, college education, in the world (not in the "third" world). Of course, since Mongolia has been blessed with the free market, living standards have been on a decline throughout the country, and nowadays, your offhand remark is more likely than not to have some substance. However, things have been improving again over the past decade or so.

The Western drive to assume that people in poorer countries are all uneducated seems to me to reflect something Hannah Arendt wrote about Soviet totalitarianism, namely that once Soviet propaganda had claimed that the Moscow metro is the only working metro in the world, there emerged a need to conquer the whole world, just so all other metros could be shut down to ensure the truth of the ideology.

[nzmsv]

He meant literacy before the Soviets. That went "whoosh".