THEY talk about this being the age of information. Here’s something to think about: dwell on the amount of information created by the human race from the very dawn of civilisation, all the way until 2003. Now, according to Eric Schmidt of Google, the human race creates that much every two days.

Every two days. That’s an absolutely fascinating estimate. All the books, the newspapers, magazines, blogs, texts, emails, and what not — the slew of information zooming around the world — every two days we create as much as we did in the entire span of civilisation till just past the turn of the millennium.

For most of human history, people lived with the scarcity of information, and thus its value. Having access to information was the trick to prosperity: knowing what the fever was and what could cure it, where and when best to plant a certain crop, which mushroom to eat and which to stay away from, how to read maps or stories or even where to find them.

But not any longer, and perhaps not ever again. From an information-scarce world, we now inhabit one driven by an information glut. As the nature of information changes, so too must the way people access it and understand it, how they select what is important and what is not.

As author Neil Gaiman said in a recent lecture delivered in London, “The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.”

Here in Pakistan, sadly, we’re still at the initial stage of trying to get every child into school. And we are far from being the only country still trying to address this challenge.

So it’s easy to forget that in much more successful countries, the question of whether education is preferable was settled a long time ago, done and dusted. Across the board, all indicators confirm that literacy and education have undeniable links to the prospect of prosperity.

But not just any education will do. Of course, the literate man or woman will do better in life in general than his illiterate counterpart, but the well-read will do remarkably better. It’s not just the fact that a person reads that counts, it’s also what he reads.

Read a lot about management and chemistry and law and you’ll be well-trained in those fields. Read history and fiction — the stories of man and the experience and collected wisdom of human civilisation — and you could be a dreamer.

The ability to dream is a much under-valued facet of life, especially in countries and societies such as Pakistan where technical know-how is prioritised. A child lost in stories of pirates and sea monsters, Sinbad and Aladdin, worlds fantastical and deeds impossible, is seen as a child wasting his time.

In too many instances, he is advised to turn to his schoolbooks instead. Every day, even amongst the people I know, I’m appalled at the number of people who may be voracious readers — good for them, it makes for very knowledgeable individuals with nuanced points of view — but who sneer at fiction.

But reading fiction is essential for the success in the long term of both individuals and the societies they contribute to. I can’t do better than to quote the illustrative example given by Gaiman.

For decades, fiction, and particularly science fiction, was frowned upon by China’s Communist party, unsurprising in a society that sets great store by hard work, diligence and a firm rooting in reality.

But in 2007, the party approved of and strongly supported the convening of the first science fiction and fantasy convention in the country’s history. Gaiman was there, and he says that at one point, he took a senior official aside and asked him, what had changed.

“It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.”

“Fiction can show you a different world”, Gaiman goes on to say. “Once you’ve visited other worlds … you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.”

For progress to happen, objects and ideas have to be dreamt up first and then created or put into practice.

Wherever you’re reading this, look around and think of the obvious: everything man-made around you, as Gaiman also points out in this lecture, did not once exist and was conceptualised and articulated by someone — from the chair on which you may be seated to the other extreme of the technology you may be using.

So in its effort to get children into school and give them literacy, Pakistan — and every other country in the world — needs to be encouraging a wide breadth of reading as well. While making this a public policy priority can help, by setting up libraries for instance, the onus lies on parents and teachers to give children this gift, this potential for transformation.

We all want them to do well at their studies, so we encourage them to learn. But if we want the young to change the future, to make it better in whichever way they choose, we must teach them to dream as well.

The writer is a member of staff. hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com