Intelligence & Education

Intelligence: The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

Education: The giving of intellectual, moral, and social instruction.

When I think of intelligence by itself, I think of Good Will Hunting. You may know the movie – a troubled young janitor working at a university strolls past a classroom and solves a mathematical equation that has been placed up as a challenge for a class. When they find out it’s him who’s solved it, he’s taken in by mathematicians who would use him to solve their evil sums, and placed under psychological analysis to find out why he has criminal leanings.

In short, he is intelligent, but uneducated. I think people end up in this sort of a position out of two primary causes. The first is that like Will they didn’t have the funds to engage in modern sophistry, and valued a line of credit above a line of candescence. They end up using their intelligence practically, improving the efficiency with which they perform their job, interact with others and in drastic cases simply survive.

In the second case, and one common throughout history, an upperclassman will believe education to be beneath them and forgo it entirely, with much the same result; the generation of a character that resists authority figures while being confident and adroit with anything they choose to undertake.

As for education, it is something of the standard in society. Intelligence isn’t equal to everyone. Some are born with it, or learn it quickly to survive. Others – most people, I think, likely including myself to one degree or another – aren’t intelligent. The only way they can hope to become intelligent is to be taught to be so. Maybe that’s possible. Recent breakthroughs in neuroplasticity research suggest that intellect is pliable and can be honed with practice. But it’s still frustrating when you know you’re trying your hardest and you still come second to someone who is naturally intelligent, as is likely to happen continuously throughout your life (so get used to it).

The point being that for most people – young people anyway – the focus of their lives is on the reception of education rather than on the application of their intelligence. Average people who tend towards scholarly-mindedness get so caught up in the quest to become intelligent, and as with many such quests they do nothing so much as define their own lack of intelligence in doing so (much like people who troll after recognition show desperation as their chief characteristic, and those seeking self-esteem look to everything before the self, which is where they eventually find it). I’d propose that learning intelligence isn’t so much about following another person’s example of intelligence, but in learning to maximise the potential of it that already exists in the student. Guiding the pursuit of their interests rather than enforcing a curriculum upon them.

Naturally that’s simply a meander into the question of method. I’ve heard it expressed that a curriculum is nothing more than a field study in aspects of intelligence, ergo Mathematics = Logic; Geography = Systems; Art = Abstraction; Sociology = Emotions, and so forth. It’s a very interesting theory, but to be honest I never really understood why we departed from the idea of universalism. We needed specialists, I guess. Whatever the cost.

A person who is educated but lacks intelligence is someone who has access to an instructive mind but cannot absorb or apply the teachings of that mind and fashion from it an original thought. Essentially, a follower. A disciple of this sort never learns to become independent of their tutor – whether that tutor be a book, a parent, a professor – and follows its example only along known paths, unable to apply anything beyond their curriculum. In many instances this isn’t totally bad – a good teacher can impart a wealth of ability to a receptive student and make them into quintessential researcher or agent of their philosophy. But the prime lack they will always suffer is in stepping beyond that, learning to build their own ideas by treating the teacher’s knowledge less as a method to work and more as a material to work with.

When these two function together, we are left with what I like to think of (with fond memories of Albus Dumbledore) as Brilliance; a blend of the unorthodox, of humility, of a willingness to learn and a willingness to teach. For many people this is the ideal standard. I certainly envy it, and aspire to it.

I think that when these two fields fail to mesh we have two very special kinds of people coming to the foreground. One, as said, is the disciple. The disciple is obedient, willing, stays the course and deals within the workings of that course even when they fail it or are declared incompetent.

The other is the rebel, a being who acts against its teachers because it envisions a different, better way to do things. The trouble with this is that with the wealth of information available in the world their attention can be drawn away from their goal. In a word, they are ‘undisciplined’. This means that even though their intelligence can be steely and exacting, they are unaware of the potential it holds to change the workings of the world beyond ordinary life. Often they even end up stabbing those closest to them with it. A good teacher and possibly the only teacher a rebel will ever be able to respect (all others are most often seen as subordinate and cumbersome) is one who has the benefit of a third element, now defined:

Wisdom: Having a show of experience, knowledge or good judgement.

Wisdom is like the opposite of born intelligence. Someone can have ability and skill as a born function, entering the world stage as a parvenu among its elders, quite their equal in the matters teachers try so desperately try to enkindle in the young. But no-one (or very few, psychically apt gentlepersons) is born with experience of the world, of the nature of love and death and the changes in perception caused by time. In this regard, even an intelligent rebel can be stilled and brought to genuflexion. They can learn to trust the judgement of the wise, not being taught what they already know, but being taught the pursuit of what no amount of intelligence can ever teach. That’s what we fail to recognise sometimes. Learning isn’t all about accumulation and application. It’s about surviving the consequences of a world where accumulation and application – In selves and others – fail us.