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What Does It Mean to Learn?

A leading computer scientist says it’s “educability,” not intelligence, that matters most.

But if we want to grasp reality in all its complexity, Valiant writes, then “cleverness is not enough.” We need to build capacious and flexible theories about the world—theories that will serve us in new, unanticipated, and strange circumstances—and we do that by gathering diverse kinds of knowledge, often in a slow, additive, serendipitous way, and knitting them together. Yet human beings constantly improve their own minds through an unfolding, open-ended process that connects newly acquired facts and ideas to ones collected long ago. We could try to figure out how to measure and teach it in schools, or to encourage it in adults; at a time when accelerating technological change means there’s always more to learn, we might seek to create a more educable society in general.

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