Long-held assumptions about intelligence are being shaken. We have regarded intelligence as something measured by IQ or test scores and attributed to the individual. Schools have faithfully institutionalized this premise. Students study alone, take exams, and their report cards record only individual scores. But in the "age of hyperconnection," intelligence does not reside in the individual alone. It emerges through connection, is amplified through cooperation, and is completed through relationships.
This is also the question posed by British neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow in "The Science of Fate." Is intelligence "mine" or "ours"? The frontiers of industry, scholarship and technology are already shifting from the era of a few geniuses to the era of connected intelligence. Google's "Project Aristotle" showed that the secret to high-performing teams lies not in IQ or dazzling résumés. The decisive factors were psychological safety and a structure of conversation in which members respected one another. How people are connected determines performance.
The rising number of co-authors on Nobel Prize-winning research, and the emergence of decisive achievements from international joint research, reflect the same trend. We have entered an age of discovery that can only be reached when people with different expertise and perspectives are connected. Yet schools still teach separation better than connection. First, assessment centered on individual achievement weakens the incentive to cooperate. Measuring individual achievement is necessary, but when it becomes the sole yardstick, the ability to think together and expand others' thinking becomes difficult to evaluate. Listening, questioning, coordinating and connecting are core competencies of the future, yet in the classroom they are treated as secondary.
Second, the structure of the classroom also blocks connection. Rows of desks, a teacher's podium at the front, and a relentless pace of instruction presuppose a structure in which knowledge flows in one direction, from teacher to student. Channels linking student to student, student to local community, and student to the world have not been placed at the center of the curriculum.
Third, we understand "smartness" narrowly as the ability to find the right answer quickly and alone. This ability is important too, but so is the ability to mediate different perspectives and find new solutions amid conflicting ideas.
Now schools must evaluate individual achievement together with contributions to cooperation. They should treat as behavioral indicators how one expanded another's thinking, what questions deepened the discussion, and how one coordinated conflict. Collaboration is not a technique for producing results together but a process of raising each other's intelligence to a higher level.
The classroom, too, must change from a closed space for transmitting knowledge into an open platform for connection. Cloud-based collaboration tools, video connection and artificial intelligence (AI) tutoring already exist. What is needed is the institutional resolve to reflect these in the regular curriculum. Teachers must become guides to knowledge as well as designers of a space where different ideas converge. Elementary schools should provide the primary experience that we can do better together; middle schools, self-exploration through collaboration; and high schools, an evaluation structure that reflects both individual and collaborative competence. This is not a proposal to lower individual excellence, but to let individual competence expand into greater social value within relationships.
Intelligence begins within the individual but is completed through connection. Teaching people to become outstanding individuals is important. But if schools fail to teach that such excellence becomes greater intelligence when it is connected with others, they will fall behind the times. We must respect individual excellence while also teaching how to connect it.
