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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful -- and Smart, Too If "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can become theoretical physicists, then we're talking about no more than a few people per thousand and perhaps many fewer. They are cognitive curiosities, too rare to have that much impact on the functioning of society from day to day. But if "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number demarcates the top 10% of the IQ distribution, or about 15 million people in today's labor force--a lot of people. W. H. Brady Scholar Charles Murray W. H. Brady Scholar Charles Murray In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements--medicine, engineering, law, the sciences and academia--the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have IQs over 120. Evidence about who enters occupations where the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people with IQs of 120 or higher also occupy large proportions of positions in the upper reaches of corporate America and the senior ranks of government. People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology. Combine these groups, and the top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence. How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out. But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized--it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children. The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens. We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom. The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire. The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level. The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good. The encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been more true. All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults. In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did. ========= Note what he is saying. We are not brighter than others through our own merits. The gifted have gifts: from God, or from Darwin, from the gene pool; our gifts are not merited. Merit comes from what we do with those gifts. I recall the shock when Brother Fidelis, in tenth grade, told me that as I was brighter than the others in my class -- something I considered self-evident, and in which I took considerable (baseless) pride, I would be expected to do better work than the others. I would do more projects, write more essays, and read more books. This was in biology (where, despite the fact that it was then still illegal in Tennessee, we were taught the theory of evolution -- and it was pointed out that since the 4th Century there has been the theory that God created the universe in germinal causes and allowed it to work out as it would). I thought this monstrously unfair. Oddly enough, he didn't care. I pointed out that I knew more of the subject the first day of the class than most of my classmates would know at its end. He was delighted: that meant that I could learn so much more. He also pointed out that I had in essence been raised by wolves: from fourth through 9th grades I had been pretty much on my own, growing up in rural Tennessee with both parents doing war work and thus having little time for me; and Capleville consolidated with two grades to the room and some 30 students per grade had hardly been the fount of systematic education. My preparation was better than it might have been because it had been made to learn the addition and multiplication tables to 12 * 12, and had been given some preparation in English grammar; and I cannot remember when I could not read. Our house was full of books. For all that, I had little systematic preparation to use the gifts given me. Why are some -- essentially every one of us here -- gifted and others not? Blind chance, perhaps. Perhaps not. In creating the universe in germinal causes and allowing the unfinished creation to finish itself, God has left us work to do. This is the doctrine of co-creation, and it has long been accepted by theologians of a non-Calvinist persuasion. And of course if the universe really is but the blind dance of the atoms, then it remains true that we can and must make of the universe what we will: the only intelligent design will be what we ourselves dream and do. just from the purely material: a nation that wastes its intellectual capital will not long sustain a First World economy. The only way to be sure no child is left behind is to see to it that no child gets ahead. That is our school system. Welcome to the coming dark ages.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
These 'gifted' people sure have a knack for producing tons of feebleminded garbage.
#2. To: Splitends (#1)
Scary, isn't it?
The customer is always right.
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