I've long been meaning to write a post about intelligence; moreover, our institutional, reductionist approach to it. When our ability to experience a phenomenon becomes trapped by the need to measure it. The institutional imperative for shoehorning the phenomenon into some system that, after all, we simply made up is so artificial.
Like Gatto, I believe it boils down to the need for humans to live in and with abstractions to ensure our minds can be harnessed for a greater, systemic agenda (whatever that may be). In light of this topic, I've thoroughly enjoyed this article in the New Yorker:
"If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents," Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century's great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn's phrase, we have now had to put on "scientific spectacles," which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
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The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. "A wise man could only do such-and-such," they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, "How would a fool do it?" The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the "right" categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
My opinion is that the "fuss" is all about making people dependent on the artificial, rationalized, predictable world of abstract systems, which can be mediated and tuned by authority. Because we never look deeply at the assumptions and premises of modern education, we're apt to take the system's agenda as the human agenda. It's not so.
Two institutions at present control our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.
But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:
- Out of the 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.
- According to recent reports children watch 55 hours of television a week. That then leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.
- My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 8 hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time they are under constant surveillance. They have no private time or private space and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves them 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and that takes some time - not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining - but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours per week.
It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, of course, the less television he or she watches, but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly prescribed by a somewhat broader catalogue of commercial entertainments and the inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his or her own choice.
If we think this level of abstraction is useful and worthwhile, then fine - but let's be honest with ourselves. We're not promoting kids' intelligence; we're promoting their capacity to conform. The kids will rise to our expectations; let's just be honest about what those expectations are. It will save a lot of time looking for scapegoats.
Read this article
