Kindergarten isn’t often referred to as an invention—let alone an important one.
But when Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Mitchel Resnick was invited to participate in a 1999 conference that reviewed the past millennium’s most significant innovations, he suggested just that.
“Some people argued that the printing press was the most important invention; others argued for the steam engine, the light bulb, or the computer,” he writes in a new book, Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play (2017). “My nomination for the greatest invention of the previous thousand years? Kindergarten.”