Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.
Steven Pinker—The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
I love this quote, and I plan to get around to reading this book soon, but I figured I should post this article which seems to say that we do have an innate instinct for numbers, addition, and subtraction, even if we may not completely realize it right away.
Steven Pinker—The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
I love this quote, and I plan to get around to reading this book soon, but I figured I should post this article which seems to say that we do have an innate instinct for numbers, addition, and subtraction, even if we may not completely realize it right away.