Humans have become cleverer. In the last few million years a lot of those upgrades were at the hardware level. Our brains grew bigger, literally tripling in size. Around 200,000 years ago that hardware-driven intelligence slowed down and if anything, it has begun to reverse. Brain sizes became smaller in the last 10,000 years or so. But we continued on a path to becoming more and more clever thanks to our shared culture. Our software improved.
Indeed, improvements in our software were probably the reason why our brains shrank. We didn’t need all that energetically expensive hardware because we were distributing our thinking to collective computation.
Much of our thinking that we now take for granted is not universal nor the way we thought since the beginning of our species, but instead comprises transmitted products of our culture that have now reached fixation – become ubiquitous – in many populations. The ability to count indefinitely beyond fingers or body parts; to read, write, store, and learn ideas through text; the tendency to reason abstractly with syllogisms and enthymemes and approximations of formal logic – all were tools for thinking that were culturally created and then transmitted. As Friedrich Hayek put it, ‘it’s culture which has made us intelligent, not intelligence which has made culture.’
In 1996, five years after gaining independence from the USSR, Estonia founded the Tiigrihüpe – Tiger Leap Foundation – to rethink and redevelop their education curriculum. With a virtually blank slate, they looked for best practices from around the world. The goal was to leap ahead of other countries by creating the most technically savvy educational curriculum in the world, thereby creating the most technically savvy people in the world. They invested in three key pillars: computers and the Internet as pathways to knowledge, basic teacher training, and native-language electronic courseware. Whether they knew it or not, they were creating a more effective cultural evolutionary environment and cleverer collective brain. They had filled the car with gas and put their foot on the accelerator.
In 1991 only half of Estonia had access to a telephone. By 2001 all schools were Internet-connected and all students had access to computers. This connected Estonia to the rest of the world’s collective brain. The curriculum was changed, encouraging and teaching students how to learn through the Internet. Teachers were trained in technology and were encouraged to seek out the best ideas from around the world and from each other. The platform SchoolLife was launched to create a teacher collective brain where teachers could share ideas, resources, and course materials.
Tiigrihüpe recognized the importance of collective brain thinking, sociality, high transmission fidelity, and sharing. When the first generation of Tiger Leap Kids entered university and then the public and private sector, Estonia was transformed forever.
Estonia continues investing in its people through a cutting-edge education system that has maintained their students’ position as the top non-Asian country in math, science, and reading. In 2012 it was the first country to start teaching programming and algorithms in elementary school to six-year-olds. In 2013 it was the first country to implement a radical approach to math education, spearheaded by Conrad Wolfram, younger brother of prodigy mathematician and physicist Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica.
In a 2010 TED talk titled ‘Teaching Kids Real Math with Computers’, a frustrated younger Wolfram explained that ‘people confuse, in my view, the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching’. His point was that we teach mathematics in the same order it was invented and this way is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Start with the Greeks and go from there. But there’s no reason that this should be the most efficient or effective way to teach mathematics. And indeed, as a result of this approach, we never get to 21st-century advancements in probability and statistics, which are probably more valuable than calculating angles in triangles or memorizing rules for figuring out the length of a hypotenuse. Trigonometry, if it needs to be covered at all, doesn’t need to be taught before algebra. And algebra doesn’t need to be taught before calculus.
Conrad’s thinking was just the latest approach that Estonia had sought to becoming brighter. It’s no wonder that Estonian students leaped forward in their PISA scores across all subjects to become the top-performing non-Asian country in the world!
Estonia’s success is a lesson to us all. It goes beyond the use of technology or any specific content. The secret is a product of an innovation mindset, high cultural and social value being placed on education, and cooperative commitment to their people and future.
Any country or even individuals can do this.
In the West you’ll often hear people saying something along the lines of ‘I was never really good at math.’ Rarely will you hear ‘I was never really good at reading.’ Western attitudes toward numeracy and literacy betray hidden assumptions not present in, for example, much of Asia.
It’s true that not everyone needs to interpret Tolstoy, but if you can’t read then you have to trust others to interpret a world of information for you, just as an illiterate person did in the past. Similarly, it’s true that not everyone needs to transform tensors, but if you can’t do simple math then you need someone to interpret personal finances, probabilities, and health decisions for you.
In many cultures math is not seen as an inherent trait that only some are good at. It’s seen more like reading – a skill that requires practice. And in these cultures children perform better at mathematics, leading to stereotypes such as ‘Asians are good at math.’ In reality, Asians are good at realizing that math is a skill that can be learned and developed with the right instruction and attitude. For me, this point was starkly made during the 2020 pandemic when schools were closed.
Drawing on the experience of my friend from engineering school, Clinton Freeman, who had been home-schooling his daughters for some time, we took the opportunity during the lockdown to bring together different curricula around the world and test how our children reacted. In math, it was astonishing the progress our kids made using the Singaporean and Shanghai curricula (which have a lot of cross-pollination with each other).
Simple things like drawing on relationships across multiple areas of mathematics or multiple approaches to solving the same problem encouraged generalization; explicit logical reasoning and clear and precise explanations for why and how an approach worked and hypotheticals about what would happen if something changed encouraged thinking about proofs; and the early use of conventional mathematical language, such as learning that letters could be numbers and introducing simple pre-algebra, removed barriers for later learning.
As a result of little changes such as these, China and Singapore are able to teach algebra in elementary school, a subject reserved for secondary school in the United Kingdom. I was good at math in school but was astonished as I watched my then six-year-old competently solve for the unknown variable ‘x’ in an equation and very quickly advance to rearranging multivariable equations to solve for different values. All thanks to small differences in how they were taught.
Our psychology, in other words, is highly hackable. We are not blank slates but our minds are highly flexible. Formal education is the primary means by which we transmit our cultural package to the next generation. The things we assume people are bad at are often the things we don’t prioritize, don’t teach, or don’t do enough research in figuring out how to teach better. For example, we assume people are highly susceptible to logical fallacies – straw-man arguments, ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority, or confusing correlation with causation – but formal logic, reason, and fallacies are also things we rarely formerly teach children at a young age in the English-speaking world. For a species so dependent on its software, logical fallacies need not be a permanent foible. Just as traditional societies were able to learn how to count, we can learn how to reason.
There are various other approaches to rethinking education. Famous among these is Elon Musk’s Astranova school, formerly Ad Astra. The school is based on pillars such as first principle learning and real-world relevance. The idea is captured by contrasting two ways to teach children about an engine. One approach is to start by teaching them about tools like a screwdriver and wrench and how they’re used. Eventually students learn how these tools help take an engine apart. It’s an approach that focuses on learning the constituent parts and building them up to the final product. But along the way, many students fail to realize the relevance of what they’re learning, which affects their motivation. They ask, ‘What’s the point of learning this?’
An alternative approach is to give students access to the tools and an engine and get them to take it apart and put it back together, learning the principles as they undertake the task – starting at the beginning and at the end and meeting in the middle with a practical and relevant focus throughout. Just as it was easier to derive the principles of hydraulics after we had steam engines, it’s easier to learn anything by doing it and seeing its most real-world relevance. This approach is one of many and may not even be the best approach, but such innovations are necessary to step off the beaten path and step on the accelerator of the Flynn effect to raise IQ everywhere.
Schools are trapped in suboptimal local equilibria and seemingly unprepared for the demands of our current world. Many parents recognize this and so to better prepare their progeny, they compensate for these inadequacies by supplementing what public systems, and even private systems, offer. Not all parents have the resources, skills, or time to do that. The increasing irrelevance of public education to the acquisition of everyday life skills further reinforces inequality and group differences, which is costly to us all.
Excerpted from A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, by Michael Muthukrishna. Published by The MIT Press. Copyright © 2023 Salgado Muthukrishna Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved.
