A life of learning – and teaching

The English version of his book How I learned to understand the World will only appear coming November, two years after his death. But the Dutch version (Mijn Kijk op de Wereld. Het leven van Hans Rosling) was published this month. It describes a life of learning (1948-2017) – from illiterate to professor.

Hans Rosling’s TED talks belong to the most often downloaded TED talks ever (see links to all of them on the website https://www.gapminder.org/ that he started with his son in 2005 – to help close the knowledge gap about the global process in the past decades, which mirrors the progress he had experienced himself.

His grandparents had been wages labourers near Uppsala in Sweden, who could hardly read and write and lived in a simple house without running water and electricity. His mother survived tuberculosis because of improved medicines. He himself was the first member of his family who studied and became a medical doctor, then a researcher, a famous statistician, and a university professor.

He was a gifted edutainer. His book Factfulness, written together with his son and his daughter in law, became a worldwide bestseller.

His personal life illustrates the relatively high level of upward social mobility during the 20^th century. In many countries, this social mobility has declined since the start of the new millennium – which may discourage lifelong learning in the foreseeable future.