The place of education/learning in the hierarchy of Engels’ curves of consumption: the quantitative basis of mechanisms finally elucidated

The study focuses quantitatively on ways to assess school education, currently under severe criticism, in terms the first of its three major components, students, teachers and curriculum,. We developed a novel method to assess long term retention as a measure of true learning in tests that do not involve any cramming and found to our dismay that it falls progressively more towards recent years. Our initial work on poverty showed that consumption on commodities is hyperbolic (as in catalysis) and hierarchic and, that the total income is not fractionally distributed among the commodities, as economists assume; the leftover (residual) income after the more essential items is spent on the commodities of lesser preference. Education is also a naturally ordered commodity and parental income quantitatively determined school dropouts/attendance obeying the same hyperbolic relationship, as we could show. We could thereby affirm the first-ever mechanism for Engels’ three curves of consumption, based on the time constants associated with the corresponding hyperbolic functions. The disturbing observation was that long term retention as a true measure of learning decreases rapidly with years and seems to be independent of socioeconomic circumstances and gender but depends on subjects. The test also revealed that those who are not good at cramming could exhibit good retention, though the conventional tests fail to identify them. Causes of the progressive loss of retention for the recent years, either as limits to learning or as limitations in imparting learning, need to be assessed by further studies. This would hopefully begin an era of inclusive education for a just society for which methodology beyond pious intentions never existed.