As a society, we easily accept the notion that we know what intelligence is and we can effectively test for it. Based on IQ tests and the scores that come out of them, we then comfortably make life-changing assumptions about what certain individuals can or cannot do, and we design entire educational systems, along with standardized curriculum to “intellectually” prepare youth for their place in the world. But as changing times and technologies across my lifetime have moved us into the information age, I have begun to wonder if our current definition of intelligence and its implications for educationand learning still make sense for the twenty-first century.
Based on a modern-day construct about what intelligence actually is, we draw from our collective beliefs about intelligence to define cognition, learning, and subsequently, education. With these beliefs as our starting point, we have created a system for teaching all children, constantly striving to more finely tune the existing system. Within this model, we have developed even more rigorous, evidence-based methods for standardizing and measuring our definition of teaching and learning. Luckily, this works for a lot of kids.
But, as someone who has made my living for 25 years conducting psycho-educational assessments for different-minded kids, I would like to ask why so many intellectually and academically capable kids are struggling in college, and afterward become stuck with unemployment. While at the same time, others with much lower measured IQ’s and poor academic histories (especially those with diagnoses under the autism umbrella) are finding success as adults in STEM and other high-level, applied, visual-learning fields, even though their childhood performance suggested that this level of adult functioning would be impossible? This leads to the question: do we, as a collective, really understand what intelligence actually is? Moreover, do we know what to do to fully develop it?
Within any definition of intelligence throughout human history, it could be said that those individuals who met the demands of their world and excelled were intelligent people. But to say this, we must first acknowledge that what we are really saying is that intelligence is entirely dependent on the time and circumstances of the society in which one lives. As such, in past generations, above-average intelligence might have been ascribed to those who easily grew crops or accurately collected medicinal plants to treat the sick. Intelligence might have even been defined by one’s ability to use some strategy to stay alive in hand-to-hand combat.
What if Spearman and others in our modern time missed something when they defined intelligence for today? More specifically, what if all of our modern-day human-thought about intelligence, our classification systems, our developmental milestones, and our very definition about what is normal and what is not is wrong for today’s 21st Century world? Wouldn’t it then be possible that at least some of today’s kids with really different minds, the ones who don’t test well, fit in, or do particularly well in school, are just misplaced and miseducated within our limited understanding about intelligence and learning?
As someone who has tested thousands of kids, I have seen countless, unnamed aspects of cognitive skill that feel like deep untapped and unmeasured abilities. As one example of many, I had a student a few years ago that could not recall a series of six numbers without first converting them into the military’s alpha-numeric coding system. Then, with that as an adaptation, he was able to store and repeat 20 digits, even though his Digit Span score, when reported in a standardized way, came in at the fifth percentile. Can anyone explain this to me? I suspect some people can. More importantly, though, this feels like deep cognitive ability, and oddities like this are common within individuals labeled as different minded or even disabled.
Within my formal training, the skills I have seen that I believe demonstrate deep intelligence, yet sometimes make an IQ score lower, are actually hard to even discuss or explain because we don’t yet have words for them. However, if you talk to people who test intelligence a lot, those of us who have given several thousand IQ tests, a common theme emerges – some kids are much smarter than their scores reflect and they often have unusual skills that are not included anywhere within our modern-day tests. Skilled clinicians know, even though they can’t prove it, that their instincts about intelligence are sometimes much better than the IQ score obtained,
