School makes you smarter

In the most popular TED talk of all time, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case that schools kill creativity. The evidence for this claim is weak. However, the evidence that schools make you smarter is robust and this has important consequences for education and the economy.

The holy grail of education is to find a way to increase people’s general abilities and yet this is hard to do because the things we learn tend to be locked to the context in which we learn them.