In the first aspect, most ordinary people in ancient times did not have the utilitarian appeal of mastering a lot of simple knowledge in their daily lives. We often complain about whether education, such as calculus, can be applied to daily life. For daily life, even the multiplication of 99 is redundant, just like many foreigners can't count and still live well. For ancient times, the uselessness of knowledge for daily life was more obvious. In ancient times, there was no national education, no examination system and no scientific system. Ordinary residents needed to know so much knowledge. In more areas and for a longer period of time, most of the energy of ordinary residents' daily life is consumed in heavy productive labor. Their knowledge needs are limited to directly dealing with the problems encountered in life, and this knowledge is also created, passed down and perfected by them in a very specific and direct way. They actually transmit knowledge by making or imitating specific lifestyles or production activities. Knowledge has no independent life form. As a result, most people are illiterate and only pass on their "knowledge" by imitating their elders in life.
But we are different now. Although we often say that a lot of knowledge is useless in daily life, education itself is very useful for everyone's daily life. The national education, examination system and scientific system have penetrated into everyone's life, in which knowledge not only has the value of knowledge itself, but also has an extremely powerful utilitarian role. We must receive education and learn knowledge to manage our daily life. Not only that, the audience of education is becoming more and more popular, making knowledge more and more simple, unlike ancient knowledge mixed with many non-knowledge barriers, such as taking a master's degree, in order to learn a certain skill, you have to sweep the land for ten years. In a word, the present knowledge is easy to understand, needs to be accepted by the people, and it is highly utilitarian to drive the people to accept it. In ancient times, the same knowledge was not even accessible to ordinary residents, and society did not have a mechanism to allocate resources through knowledge, which created the illusion that modern people were smarter than ancient people. The fact is that most ordinary people in ancient times did not learn knowledge at all, nor did they have the motivation to learn knowledge in their daily lives. Only a genius is possible.
Secondly, not all human civilizations or times attach so much importance to scientific knowledge as we do today. As the carrier of knowledge type, science has only flourished for more than 200 years. In tens of thousands of years, the theme of various civilizations or times is not science, and knowledge is not necessarily accepted by us at present. A typical example is the Middle Ages in Europe. Most knowledge in medieval Europe is a long theological theory. Even the smartest people will contribute their wisdom to theology. Just like ancient China, even the smartest people were addicted to Yin-Yang, Five Elements and Confucian ethics. The reason why modern people can easily master the knowledge that ancient elites can master is because modern people live in the natural and social environment of modern knowledge transformation. For example, our city is full of numbers, geometric figures and abstract symbols, and our life has to deal with a lot of abstract contents, which lays the foundation for contemporary human civilization to pay attention to creating abstract scientific knowledge in daily life. The ancient villages and cities were simple and simple, and their lives were intuitive. They don't need to think abstractly and live scientifically.