Do years in school make you smarter or do smarter people just stay at school for longer?
There’s a strong correlation between our IQ scores and the time we spend in education, so consistent with either possibility. But the implications for education policies are different: if education raises our intelligence we should want more of it than if it just gives us specific skills or knowledge.
Research can help answer this puzzle, using experiments to see if extra schooling really does boost cognitive abilities. A great paper pulls together results from 28 studies that did just that. Some papers show how 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. We consistently see that longer education does raise our cognitive abilities: a person’s IQ gains one to five points for each additional year of education.
The evidence also suggests these effects aren’t just flashes in the pan: they last throughout our lives. So yes, you might be born with your brain but it needs training to get to its full potential.
The welcome conclusion is that our basic cognitive abilities aren’t set in stone by the luck of birth. The more immediately important one, as Covid-related restrictions return, is that ensuring kids don’t miss out on any more education should be a top priority.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
