What's the deal with people wanting to know how they stack up against others? I'm talking about the intelligence game. Who really cares about an intelligence rating? It seems like another of those prestige games that needy people want play, so they make up this scale of numbers to quantify what they are good at. Of course, the same scale can't apply to any other talent area than the one the needy person is good at because that would ruin the prestigious feeling of the needy person.
Intelligence—bah humbug! There is no such thing. Try defining it. If you can arrive at a definition, try measuring it. If you could somehow quantify it, try replicating the results. Even if you could replicate results in one language group, could you guarantee that humans in different parts of the world would show the same intellegence levels with the same test? Exactly! That's my point.
Intelligence might be the sum total of choice + opportunity, but it is not some nebulous idea that some people's gray matter allows them to be "smarter" than other people's gray matter. Brains weigh the same. They function the same, except in rare cases of defective wiring from birth. They store information in the same way. They follow a general pattern in forming how information is transmitted and used. So, where is there room for competition in saying that somehow intelligence exists?
A little trip through the book, How the Mind Works, of a leading neurolinguist, Steven Pinker, would show how silly the formation of the question, "Is there intelligence?" is. Brains work the same way. There would have to be a fundamental difference in how different the brain works in people who are considered "smart" from those who are not "smart" before there could be a possiblity for intelligence to exist. There is no fundamental difference. Neuropaths form. Synapses form. Dendrites form. Electronic impulses carry the same amount of information in them when they are sparked.
Hopefully, we are past intelligence as a society. People are equal in brain function. It boils down to choices people make about what information they learn, when they learn it, what kind of personality governs which information is learned and how much of it to store. One might want to clear up the influences of personality on learning before taking on the notion that intelligence exists.
3 comments:
you could have just told me to get over it...:) i agree that intelligence doesn't exist, but that idea is snubbed typically...so, in order to get special treatment, aka GT pullouts, i have to play the games...because the alternative means having a child that sits unchallenged in a classroom...of course, that only signals one thing~~~a problem with the education system...and that is something that will not be fixed...
Well, I know the parenting feeling of wanting a child to excel in grade school beyond his/her peers. It's heady and junior leaguish. However, children are inventive and refuse for their time to be wasted even in unchallenging classes, so they are doing something of interest while the rest of the class are being hammered with useless reinforcement. By the time they reach puberty and junior high, the real challenge is to direct them to the field of interest they want to develop and help them recognize the various facets of that field to develop. So, even if there are GT and Pre AP and AP peers, the field of interest of our own children is the only thing that is important. We help our own children soar in music and art, or athletics, or foreign language (or whatever field), for which there are no GT, AP courses. They are simply interested and working on their own schedules to be better.
Whether you want to play the GT game in grade school or not is up to you. You know the environment you want to walk in. But, in JHS and HS, field of interest is much more important. And who knows, interest and AP, GT labels may be the same, as it is with most valedictorians.
I agree with your conclusion that what many confuse with intelligence is a point of view. Liberal elites would consider me unintelligent because of my faith in Christ. Thanks for your thoughts. Bryan
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