ll this time, have we been evaluating intelligence the wrong way? Middle school and high school were all about being taught to the test. The advent of standardized testing ensured that students were no longer learning for the sake of learning, but learning to make their school look good in comparison to others so they’d get more funding from the government. Where has that left us all as college students?
Is our intelligence measured by our SAT scores? By our GPAs? By our GREs? From experience, I can tell you that the SATs are certainly not an accurate measurement of intelligence or academic ability. I was a straight-A student in middle school and high school, and when I got to those SATs, man – let’s just say that if my attendance at the College had been dependent upon that score, I’d have never even gotten into college at all, even with a history of high course grades.
Still, there’s another problem. What does a course grade say about intelligence? An “A” in a course doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is intelligent; it could mean that even if they had no talent or affinity for the material – kind of like me in my tenth grade chemistry course – they worked diligently outside of class, with peers and with teachers, to get the passing grade and move on with their lives. How do we qualify intelligence, especially as it relates to our peers? How do teachers and professors qualify intelligence in their students? Are we all doing it wrong?
One of my favorite motivational posters says, “If you judge a fish by his ability to climb a tree, it will live its entire life believing it is stupid.” And, sadly, I think that’s the fate of too many students today. We’re taught that if we don’t make the grade, we’re just not smart enough to be in school. But how is our education system accounting for those areas of intelligence that can’t be quantified by a test grade?
As a child, Albert Einstein, who is arguably our most well-known thinker and theorizer, was believed to be intellectually inept because he didn’t say a word for the first three years of his life. When he entered school, his teachers saw only his head-in-the-clouds attitude and labeled him a lazy, socially-awkward dunce who’d never achieve anything. Look at that kid now.
Gillian Lynne, best known for her choreographic work on Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Cats,” was originally thought to be a child with a learning disability who would never achieve the focus and clarity of thought necessary for academics. After underachieving in school, her mother took her to a doctor, who asked her mother to step out of the room for a moment. He left the radio on in the examination room, and when he told her mother to look back in on her, she saw that Lynne was dancing to the music. He encouraged her to send her daughter to dance school, and voila: the world was presented with one of history’s most talented dancers, producers and choreographers who gave us “Cats,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “The Muppet Show.” If Lynne’s particular area of intelligence was never afforded the opportunity to express itself, Lynne might never have become a person known to history, and those great works of the performing arts would not be the same as we know them today.
It seems to me that these different areas of intelligence are not only understated and overlooked, but they are also, at times, counterbalanced against one another by both the education system and our society. (I’m using Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, here, when I refer to the following areas.) We often view some areas as being more “valuable” than others – we enforce a prejudice of practicality against the “less logical” areas, such as the musical, the visual/spatial and the verbal/linguistic. We emphasize logical/mathematical intelligence as more valuable and desirable, and it can be said that interpersonal intelligence – which includes extraversion and ease of social interaction – is seen as more normal, effective and desirable than that of the intrapersonal – associated with introversion, introspection and self-reflectiveness. Rather than developing a national culture (and therefore an education system) that appreciates the varied areas of intelligence equally, we glorify some and degrade others, or we ignore the fact that differences of affinity exist at all. Instead of telling the fish that it can swim if it wants to, and it should, because it swims well, we say: “Why were you born without arms? This tree isn’t gonna climb itself, young man, and you won’t make any money flopping around in that creek over there.”
It’s clear that academics do not account for the incredible diversity of intelligence, but if there is any educational level that best accommodates it, college is decidedly that. While elementary, middle and high schools tend to focus more strongly on standardized testing and a quantifying of very few areas of intelligence, college is a place where these differences are embraced more so than at any lower level.
Now, of course, there will be those who disagree, especially if they belong to a field of study that is regularly discriminated against, but the fact that we have those areas of post-secondary study at all is a start. Regardless of what your high school teachers thought of you, what your parents expect of you or what you expect of yourself, you at least have a choice. You can choose to harness your talents and pursue the craft you’re born to practice. No one’s forcing you to climb the tree, and if you know you can’t, you should also know you’re not an idiot. You just haven’t developed that hidden talent, that underappreciated affinity or that overlooked area of intelligence. You haven’t found your way to the water. But you’ll get there, and when you do, the system might be advanced just enough to accommodate it.
