Why Estonia has more $1B unicorn companies per capita and the best performing students in the West

Episode 3 of In the Field with Michael Muthukrishna

Hi Lab,

Just 2 days to go for A Theory of Everyone is released! I invite you all to join me for the book launch at LSE next Thursday Sept 28th, in person or online: https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2023/09/202309281830/theory

It’s a fireside chat with Matthew Syed, so plenty of time for questions, discussion, & book signing (if you’re there in person).

The book has also been spotted in the wild! Technically bookstores shouldn’t be selling it, but apparently a few have them on display. A photo sent by a friend:

Ok, onto the video. This is the 3rd video of my series #IntheFieldwithMM where I discuss more details about Estonia’s education system. It ties into my Guardian article from yesterday on rethinking education to make future generations smarter: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/25/the-big-idea-how-do-we-make-future-generations-smarter

In this video, I explain how Estonia embodies so many elements of a collective brain approach to innovation and evolution. Estonia recognized that the future performance of their country depended on the future performance of their people. Their Tiger Leap revolution of their education system trained teachers in technology and connected them into a collective brain, encouraged students to learn through the Internet, seek out information from around the world and added Algorithms as a fourth pillar alongside the traditional Rs of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Estonia's students now have the highest scores in mathematics, reading, and science in the Western world.

Plagiarism is bad, except when it comes to policy, where we should be plagiarizing a lot more than we do.

There's a lot we can learn from each other.

Obviously, this is all discussed in much more detail in the book.

Best wishes,

Michael

Full transcript

I'm in the country with the most unicorn companies per capita in the world. The building right behind me is the headquarters of the ridesharing company Bolt, giving Uber a run for its money. And the one behind it is the offices of TransferWise, now Wise. These are two of ten unicorns founded right here in Estonia.

In "A Theory of Everyone," I discuss how Estonia embodies so many elements of a collective brain approach to innovation and cultural evolution, including most of what I call the COMPASS Innovation Framework.

In 1991, after the Soviet period, half the country didn't have a telephone. But just 10 years later, by 2001, all schools were Internet connected and all students had access to a computer. The OECD's PISA tests students around the world in mathematics, reading, and science. Estonia is now at the top of the PISA tables in all, outperforming the rest of Europe, the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia. Only a handful of East Asian countries surpass them. They do it while spending less per pupil than the UK, US, Canada, and Australia, and far less than the OECD average.

Estonia recognized that the future performance of their country depended on the future performance of their people. The Estonian policy success story is a blueprint for innovation that other countries, corporations, and people can learn from.

In 1996, they founded the Tiigrihüpe - Tiger Leap Foundation - an independent foundation to revolutionize their education system and bring Estonia to the forefront of technology. It was through Tiger Leap that Estonia was connected to the rest of the world's collective brain, that curricula were changed, encouraging and teaching students how to learn through the Internet. Their teachers were trained in technology and were encouraged to seek out the best ideas from around the world and from each other.

The platform "School Life" was launched to create a teacher collective brain where teachers could share ideas, resources, and course materials. Plagiarism is bad, particularly in school, except when it comes to policy where we should be plagiarizing what works elsewhere a lot more than we do.

How did Estonia do it? Rather than top-down governmental control, Estonia has radical decentralization where municipalities and schools have autonomy, not unlike a startup city approach that I also talk about in my book. In Estonia, trust is placed in teachers' hands, but smart collaborations and sharing of best practices are facilitated, supported, and incentivized. It's a distributed solution to the paradox of diversity that helps Estonian educators actively seek out the best practices from around the country, other schools, communities, and municipalities, and from around the world, bubbling the best solutions to the top and sharing them widely.

Teachers are incentivized to share their knowledge, and the best are given opportunities to travel and learn from other teachers and education systems elsewhere. When the first generation of Tiger Leap kids entered university and then the public and private sector, Estonia was transformed forever.

Estonia has continued to improve and innovate, offering opportunities for radical revolutions not only in education but in governance, health care, and every other aspect of Estonian society. In 2012, it was the first country to start teaching programming and algorithms in elementary, in primary school to six year olds.

Reading, writing, arithmetic and algorithms. Students are even taught concepts from computer science, such as SCRUM and Agile methodologies for their everyday lives. In 2013, it was the first country to implement a radical approach to math education spearheaded by Conrad Wolfram, brother of Prodigy, mathematician and physicist Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica. As Conrad puts it, we currently learn mathematics in the order that it was invented. Start with the Greeks. Learn Pythagoras theorem for some reason, and then eventually algebra and calculus. But there's no reason to go through math in historical order. No reason that that should be the most efficient or effective way to teach mathematics. Because math isn't about adding and subtracting or remembering rules for calculating partial derivatives. It's about thinking. It's about logic and reasoning, only sometimes with numbers.

What does it mean, for example, to take a derivative? What does it mean to calculate an integral? When and why are these useful? Many Western education systems have let down students, particularly when it comes to math education, leading many to believe that either they're not good at it or that it's not useful. Today, Estonia recognizes that the rise of A.I. changes everything. That education itself needs another radical rethink. And so they're exploring new possibilities, such as swapping homework and schoolwork. That is, students learning through online interactive materials from the best teachers at home. And then they do their homework activities. The actual activity of learning by doing at school with teachers not as deliveries of material, but facilitators helping students learn how to learn and learn where they can find what they need online, and how best to practice.

In a world of computers on desks and smartphones in pockets and soon A.I. agents facilitating thinking and learning everywhere. The most valuable skills are no longer memorizing reams of knowledge, historical facts, or scientific formula. The most valuable skills are learning where to find this knowledge and how to use it. Kids need to learn how to learn. Kids need to learn how to seek out the most valuable information past a cacophony of noise in a world filled with information. They need to learn how to focus in a distracting world, and we all need to learn how to put what we already know to use as soon as possible for the highest return with the most real world relevance. Estonia is setting itself up to continue punching above its weight. This country, like all countries, has its problems, but it embodies a central message in A Theory of Everyone. We're often not good at designing efficient institutions and figuring out the best solutions, but we do know how to design efficiently evolving institutions that find those solutions and bubble them to the top. We can create a start up like ecosystem for all aspects of our lives that prevent us from being trapped by history and by decision made long ago.

Estonia's success so far is a lesson to us all.