A myth disappears, fortunately

Intelligence is a much debated subject.  The spectrum of beliefs out there contain a good number of followers for each.  Personally, I follow the end of the spectrum that contains the null set - there is no such thing as intelligence.

That, to many, is a contradiction in what I have done all my life.  But, I see no contradiction at all.  Once a person understands about personality, the power of interest, the allure of prestige, the drive of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and the need for utility, then intelligence becomes blended into the 6 above forces for learning and intelligence disappears.  So, why does education in this country gear everything to levels of intelligence?  That has a clear answer if you study the history of education in this country, but clearly education was never meant for the masses.  Since the 1960s, when the United States began experimenting with mass education, educators here had to buy into the intelligence belief system so that grading could be correlated with it and begin the charade of intelligence measurement..  Several measuring systems have been drawn up and justified because the masses who have gone through the 50-year-old experiment now believe it and will perpetuate it in their own and their subsequent generations.

Sad, since it doesn't really exist.  On one hand you have the general populace who try to believe that they can do anything they set their minds to and the same populace who have been educated to think that they are smart in music, art, math, language, history, or literature and dumb in one of the same list of disciplines.  They can't discern between the truth of one over the other since their education has failed them.  By 2100 A.C.E., history will refer to the current period as the time of the failed American mass education experiment.  But, they don't see it that way.  They still think that somehow both of the above principles are true.  They cannot see that the two are mutually exclusive.  Maybe after the next generation is over 30, technology will be in such a state that it will become abundantly clear that people can concentrate on something of interest or something they are driven to accomplish, let others (or machines/software) around them help them accomplish their goals, and forget this talk of levels of intelligence.

Even software is not built that way.  And eventually software will be very intertwined with the way people think.  For the moment, though, I'm stuck in a deluded world, and I await the maturing of those who are not quite in school yet to run the world a bit more practically (rather than intelligently).