Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Sternberg

Sternberg’s line lands like a quiet reprimand to anyone who treats “technology” as a Silicon Valley synonym for apps and gadgets. By insisting that “very few technologies” haven’t changed in 60 or 70 years, he’s doing two things at once: shrinking our sense of novelty and widening the frame of what counts as technology. A classroom, a test, a grading scheme, a lecture format, a college admissions pipeline: these are technologies too, in the older meaning of “tools and methods.” The barb is that we tolerate stagnation in the systems that shape human lives most directly, even as we fetishize rapid iteration elsewhere.

The specific intent reads like an educator’s pushback against institutional complacency. In education, the time scale matters. Sixty or seventy years isn’t “recent” - it’s postwar to present, the era that built mass schooling as we know it. Sternberg’s subtext is that schooling often treats its own infrastructure as natural law: IQ, standardized tests, Carnegie units, the lecture hall. Those tools persist not because they’re optimal, but because they’re legible to bureaucracies, easy to administer, and culturally comforting.

The context for a psychologist-educator like Sternberg is his long-standing critique of narrow measures of intelligence and achievement. Read that way, the quote isn’t techno-optimism; it’s a warning about the mismatch between what society claims to value (creativity, adaptability, real problem-solving) and the ancient machinery we keep using to sort people. The sting is that the “future” arrives everywhere except the places that decide who gets one.