Your field of study also includes cultural issues. No this question is not basically right. No one can say if a culture is weak or strong, bad or good, advanced or retarded. Only the appearances are different. This can not be considered the same with the level of technology or the big number of universities.
Progress comes gradually about through painstaking efforts.
The culture of a shepherd is particular to him and he is not expected to act like a medical doctor. Two or three generations later, the offsprings of this shepherd can attain higher educations. My grandfather was an illiterate laborer in Belgium, but my parents were a little educated, so much so to enable them to read papers or write letters. Look at me now, I am a university lecturer. That is to say three generations later in the Western Europe an illiterate laborer changed into a university lecturer.