[siyqisto] Everyone is born a genius

Every baby is born a genius, capable of incredible mental feats of intelligence.  The most famous ones include language acquisition, learning social rules and context, temporal reasoning of cause and effect, motor control, three dimensional vision and spatial reasoning, but there are many, many more.  The ones listed happen to be fields in AI, wherein one realizes just how difficult these tasks are when trying to make a computer do them.

From this perspective, consider the point of education, especially primary education, not to be to make the student smarter, but just to prevent the student from becoming stupid.  Maintain the curiosity, inquisitiveness, absorption ability, flexibility to new and different concepts.  These skills will be important for critical thinking later in life.

There is probably a lot already done in education and psychology research, but likely a lot remaining to do, about how "the stupid" develops. Primary education might end up looking very different.

The success of such an education can be measured through tests.  The tests always test something completely new, something far different from anything the student has never encountered.  (In this wide world of ours, there is always something new.)  The tests are a tests of mental flexibility, and perhaps can be graded against how well a baby or very young child will do at each task.

These will be the weirdest tests.  You cannot study for them because you don't know what they will be, by design.  They are radically different from today's standardized tests, for which the curriculum is known (and arguably flawed), so the teacher can teach targeting success on the tests.

Speculate that illiteracy is caused by the ability to learn to read already having been destroyed by the time of teaching reading. That's why the student fails to learn to read even though other students in the same class succeed. There seems to be a correlation of poverty and illiteracy. Which actions in childhood poverty destroyed the ability to learn to read? I speculate too much "don't do X" for many X seemingly unrelated to literacy, but shuts down the brain.

Education is neither the filling of a pail nor the lighting of a fire.  It is the keeping lit of the original fire, preventing it from being extinguished.