Tag: intelligence

All the brilliant children

On Monday, June 8, 2015

This is the time of year when graduation ceremonies and parties abound. I love graduations and celebrations of educational achievement. One thing with which I struggle, and I know this is MY problem, is the idea that all the children are brilliant. Here is an article in The Atlantic that describes the different ways parents describe their children in different countries. Europeans tend to describe their children as having qualities like “happy” and “easy” while Americans tend to describe their children as having qualities like “intelligence” and “asks questions.” I think this says a whole lot more about the parents than the children. Hard work, faithfulness to God, graciousness, kindness, obedience and love did not make any of the lists.

I do not know which is worse, a life focused on one’s own happiness or a life focused on being the smartest guy in the room. Intelligence is not immutable. A life focused on the pursuit of personal happiness or ease is a choice, not to mention a wasted life. The measure of a life well lived has nothing to do with any of these things. Happiness is often a bi-product of hard work, helping others and doing the right thing. Thankfully, the measures of a successful life are not happiness and/or intelligence–they are things over which we have direct control like self denial, hard work and love of others. Jesus, Mother Theresa and even Abraham Lincoln personified that. While happiness and intelligence might have entered the picture in their cases, they were certainly not the defining characteristics of their success.

Individual brilliance at math, art, writing, sports and music are so commonly attributed to high school students at their graduation that the meaning of that word has been sorely diluted over the years. People really cannot know whether they are great at math until they have studied Real Analysis, Abstract Algebra and beyond. They cannot know they are truly gifted musicians until they play their instrument side-by-side (even if only figuratively) with others who have practiced their violin eight hours per day for the last fifteen years. With art, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As for sports, a state championship in virtually any sport still leaves the student untested even at the lowest levels of college athletics which are no where close to the pros or the Olympics. I hope the best for all those people in America who believe their children are brilliant, but it is a disservice to give them the idea they are gifted when ninety percent of the gift is just really hard work after they have gotten past the basics.

I guess part of my high dudgeon is a result of the offense I took when someone made light of my belief that our children are not super intelligent. I was actually told I was just being silly. It is petty of me, but our children are in a good place academically because they worked hard for a long time. Their current success is way less a result of any innate intelligence than that hard work and tenacity. Assigning their accomplishments to something over which they have little control belittles their efforts. Maybe they are intelligent, but again, if they are, it is more because of that hard work and what might be characterized as “earned” intelligence.

Betty Blonde #340 – 11/04/2009

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Are our kids smart? Are yours?

By Dad

On Saturday, August 23, 2014

In Education

We have tried to avoid making claims about the intelligence of our children. Partly that is because it is so grating to hear parents and grandparents state that their children and grandchildren are super-intelligent based on how soon they learned to say the alphabet, read, or memorize poetry. Mostly, though, it is because our kids had to work very hard at their learning. Some concepts that might have come easily to a gifted few required extended hard work from them. These periods of extended hard work came every semester and it is no different now that they are in graduate school. Measures of intelligence are fairly controversial and seem to pit people against each other much more than any benefit derived from insights about why their intelligence is what it is.

That is why I was very grateful to read what I believe to be a brilliant and true blog post by Salman Khan of the famous Khan Academy. His belief, backed by a growing body of research, is that a mindset that embraces rather than avoids the struggle and failure required to fight through hard material is more conducive to learning than just about anything else. I highly recommend you read the whole thing. This is a belief I have long held–it is hard, but worth it to learn hard stuff. A corollary to all this is that intelligence is not fixed. He has (of course!) a great little video that goes with the article to illustrate his point. Here is a quote from the article to whet your appetite. Please read the whole thing.

[Dr. Carol Dweck] has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.

The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they’re malleable.

Betty Blonde #156 – 02/19/2009

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Is average intelligence rising or falling in the world?

By Dad

On Thursday, August 21, 2014

In Education

The subject of intelligence is fascinating to me. Our family has worked hard to do well in school and we have had some success, but we have no illusions about the idea that we are super intelligent. My peers at work are generally a lot smarter than I; the only reason I get to play in their sandbox is because I have worked in the field longer than the vast bulk of them and have picked up a lot of tricks. Experience is the great equalizer. Charles Murray and Richard Hernnstein wrote a controversial book about it titled The Bell Curve about the impact of race and culture on measured intelligence. My take on that was that if culture has an effect on intelligence, maybe work ethic and dedication to lifetime learning might shove my kids up the intelligence curve a little and make their lives better.
The other day, while reading one of my favorite blogs, down in the comments I saw a reference to an something called the Flynn Effect. Wikipedia describes it this way:

The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day.

Wikipedia does a pretty good job of describing the effect and it makes good sense, but that very same day I ran into this article that says that with the rise in population, intelligence falls. This article has several more references that back up the idea that idea that intelligence is on the decline and for more reasons than just an increase in population. I am kind of not sure what to think about the whole thing. Probably a good mindset to have on all this is to do something about the things over which I have control–teach my kids a strong work ethic and the importance of lifelong learning.

Betty Blonde #155 – 02/18/2009

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