Our education system needs a radical rethink for the digital age
What are some of the things humans can do that other animals can’t? Humans can count, humans can read, humans can reason. These advanced abilities are often attributed to the human brain as a piece of hardware. However, just as the usefulness of Excel, Google, or ChatGPT are not found in computer circuits but in the software that runs on them, most of our cognitive abilities are not the result of anatomical evolution either. The brain itself has scarcely changed since the rise of modern humans, if anything shrinking in the past few thousand years. Instead, 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.
