Brighten Youth Education Centre
Education has many functions. One of those functions, we would hope, is to make us more intelligent.
Current research indicates there's a strong correlation between our IQ scores and the time an individual spends in education, although it's not yet clear whether school makes you smarter or that smart people just remain in education longer.
This link might not seem significant if we consider the function of education in a narrow sense.
However, the implications for education policies are different: if education raises our intelligence it would have a function - in a governmental context - beyond the impartation of specific skills or knowledge.
A new survey might shed further light on the debate. It found that the longer we spend in education, the more intelligent we remain for the rest of our lives.
The paper, a joint project between the University of Edinburgh and the University of Texas at Austin, is a meta-study of 28 existing studies (https://labs.la.utexas.edu/tucker-drob/files/2019/08/Ritchie-Tucker-Drob-2018-Psych-Science-How-Much-Does-Education-Improve-Intelligence.pdf).
Collectively, this included data from 42 datasets involving over 600,000 participants.
The meta-study indicated that results from existing papers varied. Some papers suggested that progress varies by years of education while others investigated the effect of lengthening compulsory schooling in Norway in the 1960s via tests on young men entering the military.
Collectively, results demonstrated that an increased time spent in formal education improves our cognitive abilities. Broadly speaking, a person's IQ gains one to five points for each additional year of education.
The study concluded that education " appears to be the most consistent, robust and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence."
The overall conclusion is that our cognitive abilities aren't set in stone when we're born. Nurture, in this case, seems to be playing a bigger role than nature.
The implications, however, as Covid restrictions return to schools around the world, are significant. There is already a raft of data to indicate that students of all ages suffer adverse effects from prolonged bouts of online learning. They range from increased levels of mental-health problems to impeded infant development resulting from parental stress and distraction.
If schooling really does have a greater impact on cognitive abilities than inherent capabilities, then it is vital to ensure measures to combat the educational impact of Covid are devised.
We also need to remember that education has always had functions beyond the simple impartation of facts. The acquisition of knowledge is a single pleasure in and of itself. It helps us learn to think creatively and critically. It facilitates our ability to expand our understanding as a species. It shapes other facets of our personality. None of these impacts were included in the above meta-analysis.
If you have any questions about our column, or the issues raised within it, please e-mail them to us: enquiry@brightentestprep.edu.hk
