Economist Joel Mokyr, who won the Nobel Prize in 2025, asks why some societies generate sustained economic growth while others, with seemingly similar resources and institutions, do not. At a time of great uncertainty about our social and economic progress, his question feels urgent.
In A Culture of Growth, he argues that economic growth depends not just on capital accumulation and literacy. Instead, the key is something subtler: the accumulation, transmission, and exploitation of “useful knowledge,” supported by cultural norms that value truth-seeking, experimentation, and the application of ideas to practical problems. Growth happens when societies create the conditions under which knowledge actually compounds, not just by sending more people to school for more time.
Mokyr’s insight rests in part on research by development economist Lant Pritchett. In 2001, he asked a very discomfiting question for those of us in the school business: “Where Has All the Education Gone?” Examining decades of global data, Pritchett found that the dramatic expansion of years of schooling, across much of the world in the second half of the twentieth century, did not reliably translate into faster economic growth.
To be clear, Pritchett and Mokyr both agree that education matters. There are tons of evidence that, for individuals, schooling raises wages and life chances. But those who advocate for policy interventions must ask why large, well-intentioned investments in mass schooling haven’t delivered the kind of broad-based economic or civic returns we hoped for.
Since 2001, Prittchett’s critics have emphasized a simple point: What schools teach—and whether students actually learn it—matters most. The goal must be building knowledge that can be used productively, both at work and as citizens. In many contexts, we reward credentialing rather than competence—producing, most recently, college freshmen who struggle with remedial math or can’t sustain reading complex books. In far too many cases, what looks like “education” on paper doesn’t produce either deep learning or civic engagement.
Reading this with Mokyr in mind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’ve been having a parallel conversation (often without realizing it) in K–12 education. For readers familiar with E.D. Hirsch, who has long argued that shared background knowledge is essential for literacy and civic participation, this sounds familiar. But Mokyr adds a deeper—and timely—claim: that shared knowledge is not only socially binding, but epistemically productive. It is the foundation of a truth-seeking culture that allows societies to generate, test, and improve ideas over time.
For decades, we have expanded American schooling in exactly the ways Pritchett would predict might disappoint at scale. More standards. More assessments. More emphasis on generalized skills like critical thinking and problem-solving. Reading strategies that we mistakenly believe transfer across subjects. And yet, we continue to see stubbornly flat outcomes in reading comprehension, history knowledge, and civic understanding. It’s not that schools aren’t trying. It’s that activity and alignment have come to substitute for the accumulation of knowledge.
Here’s where Mokyr’s argument becomes unexpectedly relevant to elementary education.
Mokyr shows that growth depends not just on access to education, but on what kind of knowledge is being built and how coherently it is transmitted. Useful knowledge, in his sense, is cumulative. It stacks. It provides a foundation for further learning and application. Without that foundation, societies can look busy and educated without becoming more capable.
Mokyr also emphasizes an idea that has become a third-rail in education debates: truth-seeking, not just as a civic virtue, but as a social mechanism. His claim is that growth depends not just on creativity or critique, but on norms that allow societies to distinguish better ideas from worse ones. That focus is distinct from the argument for knowledge as cultural literacy alone; Mokyr is describing the conditions under which knowledge becomes self-correcting and cumulative.
That distinction matters enormously for schools. Far too often “critical thinking” is treated as a general skill, detachable from subject matter. But without background knowledge—shared facts, concepts, and reference points—there is very little to think critically about or to evaluate as true or false. Skepticism without knowledge collapses into opinion; analysis without content becomes performance. In practice, truth-seeking requires familiarity with a domain before judgment is even possible. Kids cannot evaluate historical claims without history, scientific arguments without science, or texts without vocabulary and context. Content is a precondition of critical thinking, not its enemy.
Yet in the early grades, especially K–5, we often do the opposite. We prioritize skills divorced from content. We treat knowledge as interchangeable, or worse, as a distraction from “learning how to learn.” Far from stifling curiosity, shared knowledge gives students something meaningful to be curious about.
This challenge is particularly acute for disadvantaged students. Less likely to accumulate cultural capital at home, they depend more heavily on school—especially K–5—to lay that foundation. A skills-based approach denies these kids the very thing that makes schooling productive.
This is the primary and secondary school analogue of Pritchett’s puzzle. Education goes in. Human capital doesn’t reliably come out.
Mokyr’s life has been dedicated to explaining how countries that take seriously the production, transmission, and application of knowledge expand economic opportunity for all their citizens. It follows, therefore, that elementary education is not peripheral to economic and civic life. It is foundational. K–5 is where we decide whether our schooling “investments” are the equivalent of crypto or ideas that are built to last. Whether these investments will actually compound over time or fail to beat even inflation.
The implications are not especially ideological, but they are demanding. Being serious about education’s contribution to growth means being serious about curriculum. It means asking not just whether children are “engaged” or “thinking critically,” but what knowledge they are accumulating, how coherent it is across grades, and whether it prepares them to read widely, reason carefully, and participate meaningfully in civic life.
That can sound old-fashioned when many experts demand we focus on “21st century skills.” But Mokyr’s work reminds us that societies do not advance by cultivating skills in the abstract. They advance by building institutions, like schools, that take truth seriously, transmit knowledge coherently, and allow ideas to compound over time. If we want education to deliver on its economic and democratic promise, especially at scale, we can’t treat content as optional enrichment. It must be understood as the mechanism by which schooling actually works. The question is not whether students should think critically, creatively, or independently—but what they need to know to do so in ways that are meaningful, truthful, and durable.
The growth question, it turns out, begins in elementary school.
