The changing shape of education?

 Another exciting article from the Guardian!

...much of our thinking is the result of successive cultural software upgrades; of thousands of years of evolving knowledge, skills and ways of thinking passed down through generations.

Take numbers. Our ancestors had a limited counting system, just as some small-scale societies do today. They counted 1, 2, 3 … and then “many”. Those that went further used stones, notches or body parts, but these systems don’t make the concept of zero obvious, let alone negative numbers, despite their usefulness in all sorts of calculation.

Then, in the 17th and 18th centuries, a new concept was developed – the number line, with digits arranged in sequence, horizontally. Moving from objects in front of us to positions in space made both zero and negative numbers more intuitive and teachable, even to young children. A world of complex arithmetic was opened up...

In the 1980s, intelligence researcher James Flynn noticed that IQ test scores were increasing over time. This became known as the Flynn effect. As schools got better and became accessible to more and more people, average IQ increased. Our societies reflected this new baseline: even entertainment became more complex. Think of the “Wham, Bam” Batman of the 1960s compared with the Dark Knight of the 2000s. Today’s lowest-brow TV has more characters and more convoluted storylines than anything our parents watched. But then progress stopped...

The Flynn effect has plateaued in the developed world. Innovations in education have stagnated. Schools remain fossils from a world before the internet and certainly before AI. In Britain, Venki Ramakrishnan, the head of the Royal Society, described Britain’s A-level system in which most students take just three subjects as no longer “fit for purpose”. Such systems, sculpted for an industrial society, falter in the face of a postindustrial, information economy. Schools were built for a world before the vast library of human knowledge became instantly accessible at our fingertips, through the computers on our desks and smartphones in our pockets.

Paradoxical as it may seem, plagiarism might be the answer. Plagiarism is how Estonia went from being a country where only half of households had access to a telephone in 1991 to one whose students top the western world in the OECD’s Pisa tables in mathematics, reading and science, beating the rest of Europe, the US, UK, Canada and Australia. It also has the highest number of $1bn startups per capita in the world. It has achieved this while spending far less per student than the OECD average...

See the Guardian for details and the argument!