Reading and math are the skills kids need most
I just watched Cania Citta and Barry Sianturi talking on Malaka Project, an Indonesian YouTube channel, about the most important skill for kids. The answer isn’t coding, it isn’t English, and it isn’t AI.
The answer is reading and math.
What got me thinking: if these are the most basic skills, why are they the ones so many people still don’t have? That includes a lot of the adults around us.
A driver’s license for the brain
Barry gave a number that made me stop: only 32% of 15-year-olds in Indonesia can solve math problems at the most basic level of PISA.
The most basic level isn’t integrals. It isn’t calculus. The problems are word problems: all the information is already there, and you just have to understand it, pick out what’s relevant, and plug it into a formula that’s also given to you.
And 2 out of 3 of our kids haven’t reached that level.
Barry said literacy and numeracy are like a driver’s license for the brain.
Literacy isn’t just being able to read. It’s being able to:
- catch the meaning between the lines
- compare two pieces of writing
- be suspicious of a weak argument
Numeracy isn’t just being able to count. It’s being able to look at “5%” and understand what it means for your life.
What I thought about the longest was Barry’s point that this is the foundation for every other kind of intelligence, including moral and emotional intelligence.
Why? Because weighing a moral dilemma also takes clear thinking. You have to compare consequences. You have to read the context.
If our capacity to think gets cut off at the root, our capacity to be a good person gets cut off with it.
Learning debt
Barry gave a concept that really stuck with me: learning debt.
A first grader who can’t read fluently yet finds the material in second grade harder, and by third grade it makes even less sense. Every year the debt piles up.
On the other hand, a kid who’s strong from the start saves up every year. And those learning savings compound.
By age 15, the gap can be worlds apart.
What makes me sad is that many adults carry this learning debt, maybe including me.
The effects are subtle but real:
- not wanting to read anything long
- struggling to work out the interest on a loan
- taking the news at face value
And we don’t notice, because it’s become our default.
Barry calls this availability bias: we feel we’ve “made it” with the options we have, when really we’re only playing in a small subset of what’s possible.
Career choices, ways of thinking, the narratives we believe: they get cut off upstream because of a weak foundation.
Freedom only shows up once you have the tools. Before that, it’s called structural limitation.
Memorizing, and being a citizen
Interestingly, Barry doesn’t agree with being “anti-memorization”. In Barry’s view, we need to memorize the basic terms first before we can do higher-level thinking.
The analogy is cooking: you have to memorize the names of the spices and how much of each to use, and only then can you improvise a recipe.
If nothing is memorized at all, we have no foundation to think with.
The part that hit me hardest: numeracy is tied to civil liberty.
Talking about taxes, fuel subsidies, higher contributions to BPJS (Indonesia’s social insurance program), new policies: all of it needs a feel for numbers. Without that, all we can do is react. Get angry when everyone’s angry, stay quiet when it’s quiet.
Our agency as citizens is quietly shaped by this ability.
What I took away
Three things stayed with me:
- Literacy and numeracy are human capital infrastructure. On the same level as roads and electricity.
- Learning debt compounds. The longer it goes unpaid, the more expensive it gets.
- These skills aren’t just for kids. Those of us who are already adults can still (and need to) pay off our debt.
The full conversation is on the Malaka Project channel (in Indonesian). It’s long, but really worth it.