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Thursday, December 09, 2004
“The Smartness Cult”
After encountering the post on “free ice cream,” one incensed reader wrote to tell your Curmudgeon that...no, let’s have him say it himself, with perhaps a few asterisks to smooth out the rough spots:
You ****s on the right deserve everything we’ve been saying about you. Just reading **** like your “free ice cream” post makes me want to heave. Your opinion of yourself couldn’t get any higher if you put it on the Space Shuttle.
Where the **** do you get off with that **** about writing for people with high IQs? If IQ meant anything, you wouldn’t have voted to make that smirking Jesus freak King of the World. Maybe you should stop patting yourself on the back about your high IQ and spend some time studying how the world REALLY works: connections and clout.
Your Curmudgeon has been on the receiving end of this sort of thing before. Sometimes, it’s just an expression of the “I’m as good as you” malady C. S. Lewis described in Screwtape Proposes A Toast, which is to say: it’s just verbalized envy. But at other times—when it comes from persons of detectably high intelligence themselves—it’s a bit harder to plumb.
First, let’s spend a few words on the subject of intelligence and the measurement thereof. There is some fuzz on the concept of intelligence; people do use the word in a somewhat vague fashion. The consensus among cognitive-studies scientists is that the best interpretation of the term is the ability to reason from postulates, facts, and abstractions to accurate, usable conclusions: in other words, the ability to process information at a profit. While this is obviously not the only survival skill a man might possess, it’s equally obviously a valuable trait—the more so as human society and its supporting technologies become more complex and capable of both use and misuse.
The precise and accurate measurement of intelligence, or of intellectual potential, is even more controversial. If intelligence is about handling information, then to measure it requires that we quantify the significance of demonstrated ability to process this group of facts and theories, and justify its significance relative to that group over there. We must also cope with other questions: whether speed matters; whether some mistakes are “better” than others; whether there’s an inherent cultural matrix involved in any assessment of an individual’s intelligence, or whether it’s possible to gauge it in an entirely acultural fashion.
Your Curmudgeon is not a cognitive scientist, though he’s interested in the field and has read fairly widely in it. His sense of the state of the art is that testing methods are at an all-time high for both accuracy and precision, that they cope reasonably well with the peripheral questions of speed, ambiguity, and cultural binding, and that the measurements they produce correlate better than ever before with subsequently demonstrated proficiency at tasks in the symbolic and intellectual realms.
Yet none of this, in some sense, truly matters, for the whole subject of intelligence and intellectual metrics has been ruled taboo by the opinion-mongers of our day. As evidence, regard the storm of denunciations weathered by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray over their landmark book The Bell Curve, merely for arguing that generalized intelligence is measurable and in some degree inherited.
Test it yourself. Suggest to someone—left, right, center, it doesn’t really matter—that the ever-increasing complexity of American society is part of the reason for an enduring “underclass,” because membership in the “underclass” correlates strongly with low intelligence, and watch the fireworks. Far more often than not, your conversational partner will either reprove you for your “elitist” notions about intelligence or, at minimum, take care to insert the “standard disclaimer” that “nobody really knows what intelligence is or what intelligence tests measure.”
The really strident opponents of measurable intellect will accuse you of being a member of the Smartness Cult. That is, they’ll charge you with wanting to glorify yourself on the strength of your own intelligence, with not appreciating the value of other human strengths, and with wanting to rationalize your “contempt” for those who don’t qualify for Cult membership.
Your Curmudgeon has been accused of this. It was an appalling thing to face. Were it not for his famous self-command, it would have been far more appalling for his detractor, over whose head the Angel of Death hovered, ready to descend in a trice.
Are there very intelligent people who give themselves airs for it, and look down their noses at others less generously endowed? Of course, just as is the case with some athletes, some of the artistically gifted, and some champions of the imagination. But that speaks to an independent human failing, the sin of vanity. It has no bearing on the reality or measurability of intelligence.
But more important than any metric plucked free from its context is the question at the root of all science: whether the measure of intelligence that we call IQ can be used to predict anything. The answer appears to be yes. IQ is a very reliable predictor of success in school, in the practice of the sciences, and in certain fields of commercial endeavor. IQ is also a reliable predictor of future scores on IQ tests—another way of saying that the tests themselves produce reproducible results. This appears to be the case not only for individuals, but also for well defined populations.
These are matters your Curmudgeon’s irascible reader quoted above would do well to ponder, whether he’s inclined to do so or not. For it is universally accepted that to attack an argument without studying the factual and rational bases for that argument merely marks one as not very bright.
Comments
It’s strange what people choose to pick on, isn’t it? That ‘Free Ice Cream’ post was, as I recall, mostly a ‘feuilleton’—more a reminder of ground covered than one of your “bold, novelly-argued and rigorous challenges to preconceived notions."(tm) I guess you pushed his ‘IQ button.’
As to IQ itself, and its testing: there’s no question they’re measuring something. But they don’t know what they’re measuring, exactly; and they don’t have a model of mind capable of predicting results. While this doesn’t obviate the value of IQ testing, it recommends caution about assigning meaning to IQ scores far beyond the domain of their immediate utility.
As you say, the tests have slowly become better at their prime application: taking a sample group and quickly sorting out who’s most likely to succeed in a particular milieu—school, job, field of study or endeavor, etc. This is economically efficient—obligatory, I think, in a relatively free, ‘non-tracked’ educational system and economy/job market, where large pools of candidates with diverse backgrounds are free to apply to schools, colleges, jobs essentially at will, forcing institutions and businesses to deal with large candidate pools expeditiously.
There are, of course, mistakes often made in applying IQ test scores, even in controlled contexts. Some of these are systematic: by assigning a specific integer score rather than a band or range, individual IQ tests encourage what may be meaningless borderline judgements. Is a kid measured at 138 really “smarter” than a kid measured at 133? What if the second kid was up late, the night before the test?
Beyond this kind of caution lie, as you say, questions of cultural bias, relative fluency in English, schooled familiarity with subject matter (at issue even in non-verbal IQ testing—if a child has never seen or handled blocks before, its initial performance on block-fitting tasks will be low, but the child will test much higher after three days’ nondirected practice) and other issues. That these blind spots exist suggests that rankings produced by such tests will likely be more consistent—hence more valuable—for culturally-, economically-, socially-, and educationally-homogeneous, same-age groups. And so experiment and analysis have repeatedly shown.
Which leads back to the question of what these tests are measuring. And my strong suspicion, given all the above, is that it’s nothing remotely universal. I think the best (and most illuminating) way to think about these tests is that they measure how much the subject and the test-maker have in common with one another.
This accounts adequately for their repeatability, ability to test for success in school and in some careers. And it accounts “neutrally,” as it were, for their presumed cultural and other biases. If true, however, it also raises serious questions about the permeability of intrasocietal and intraeconomic barriers, and about how well (or rather, how poorly) educational, media and other systems are working to promote assimilation, thereby enabling mobility.
Posted by on 12/09/2004 at 11:53 AMIn the computer industry, the most frustrating aspect of the intelligence discussion is seeing someone who is undeniably brilliant in technical matters, but doesn’t seem to extend that brilliance outside the field.
For example, I know one fellow who is widely regarded as a worldwide expert on some Microsoft technologies, particularly .NET. He also knows a lot about Java. If anyone ever said to him something like “Java rules. .NET sucks. Anybody who chose .NET for anything is retarded.”, then he would rightly regard their opinion as worthless. And the same would be true if .NET and Java were switched in the statement above. Both technologies have advantages in certain situations, and part of the general nature of intelligence is the capability to do cost-benefit analyses on such issues in particular cases.
But this same guy, when it comes to politics, all of a sudden becomes a dogmatic leftist. He stated that “Anyone who votes for Bush is retarded.” He also asserted that “everyone knows” that Bush would reinstitute conscription within two months of being re-elected.
He would never put up with such sloppy reasoning in a technical field. Yet he is unable to extend his reasoning capabilities outside technology.
So just how intelligent is he? In a world in which the carefully defined parameters of technology were not present, would he be considered brilliant? I suspect not. I think his intelligence is limited in scope. He’s able to manipulate the sharply defined symbols involved in technology, and is thus a superb software architect and developer. But when the parameters get fuzzier in real world issues, his symbolic processor doesn’t function nearly as well. Most people would say he lacks “common sense” or “intuition”.
That kind of person seems to be the type that attacks others concerning intelligence. They have defined intelligence in a narrow sense, and they consider themselves to be of high intelligence using that definition. But in that world, the borders of what is right and wrong, what makes sense and doesn’t, are much sharper. “There ain’t no lies in the code”, and Microsoft people use to say. It either works or it doesn’t.
Outside that arena, they do not process fuzzy concepts well, and that opens them to being manipulated by educational systems and media. They take too many opinions as facts, and manipulate them internally as if they were facts. And then they don’t understand how anyone can disagree, especially someone of supposed high intelligence, because they believe they formed their opinion via facts and logic. They don’t realize they are displaying the GIGO law in action. Others are reaching different conclusions because they don’t make the same simplifying assumptions as to what is “true”.
I think many of the left have that problem, even if they don’t work in the technology industries. Their form of intelligence works well with sharply defined symbols, but not with fuzzy, real-world issues. So they just coerce fuzzy evidence and opinion into the closest equivalent sharp facts. And then get upset when others don’t make the same oversimplifying assumptions that they do.
(Some doctrinnaire libertarians are guilty of the same form of faulty reasoning.)Posted by on 12/09/2004 at 01:03 PMJohn, it might appear that I’m picking on you these days, but I think we disagree on the fringes of semantics. With that said, I think the IQ tests are much more important in what they tell us.
The basic disagreement between the Right and the Left has to do with Equality. Boil them down, resort them, throw them up in the air and see how they land—no matter how you sort it, it always comes back to this core issue: Equality.
Thomas Sowell probably, besides our gracious Curmudgeon host, championed this concept more than anyone else.
The issue comes down to measuring how well we’re doing at this Equality thing by either measuring Input or Output. In other words, Conservatives pressure government to guarantee that Equality in OPPORTUNITY ("input") is maintained. Liberals (in their various names, Democrats, Socialists, etc.), measure our success or failure with this Equality experiment that is America, on OUTCOME ("output").
If, for example, more black New Jersey drivers get speeding tickets on the Parkway then it means, by measuring outcome, that New Jersey police are unfairly targeting black drivers. They’re measuring outcome to determine equality (or proof of fairness or proof of racism/bigotry).
In that example, the outcome measurement ended up giving a false positive on the “proof of bigotry” the Liberals wanted. It ended up that the speeders on the highways in New Jersey were, in real numbers not percentages, more likely to be black. With further study, they not only found that speeders were more likely to be black, the police were more likely to not step them, because they themselves had noticed the disparity and wanted to give the illusion of fairness, where none existed. Black speeders were written up at lower speeding rates (than they were actually driving) than whites.
When the report was completed did the Liberals retract their accusations of bigotry leveled at the New Jersey police departments? No. Not only did they not apologize, they insisted that the report be silenced. In a true socialist fashion, if the truth doesn’t conform to your hypothesis, hide or lie about the facts.
These same things have occurred with accusations that home lending companies are behaving unfairly to minorities. Charges of racism were heard again. While there is some validity to the charges, and any racism--no matter how small--should be intolerable, the fact of the matter was that minorities were more likely to have lower credit scores than whites, which result in more “no” decisions when it came to home lending. Racism wasn’t the reason for the disparity in outcome. Credit scores, the input, was the reason for the disparity.
Feminist groups have long complained that women were earning less than men for the same job. But when you account for the choices women make, choosing to be stay-at-home-Moms, taking long sabbaticals from work to raise children, etc. and compare that to men who do the same, women in the same point in their careers as men are actually earning MORE than men (I think it was $1.07 to the man’s $1.00). When you actually compare apples-to-apples, the overall outcome measurement was misleading.
In every case I can think of, where there have been accusations of racism or bigotry, by reviewing the outcome, the conclusions have been wrong, or the percentages attributed to it were much smaller (fractions) than the outcome analysis would suggest.
If individuals are different, if each person brings to the table a unique set of skills and talents (and exercises choices differently), and that is what is determining the outcome, not the availability of opportunity (or the fact that the same doors are open to everyone), wouldn’t that prove that America is actually a decent place? That the experiment of Equality is actually working?
Sure, we have things we need to fix and things aren’t perfect, but they are a lot further towards the side of perfect than to the “race mongering elitist prigs white male dominant homophobic wife beater” side.
As Thomas Sowell writes about constantly, in just about every case, when you look at outcome, rather than input, it is going to be wrong.
The next step, which follows my long winded explanation above, is measuring the “WHY?” If we can now rule out racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., why is the outcome different when the opportunity IS the same?
Could it be that minorities, men and women, are different? What ARE those differences? Is it ambition (testosterone)? Intelligence (proper diet)? Environmental (good parenting and education opportunities/methods)?
(continued in next comment)
Posted by Mrs. du Toit on 12/09/2004 at 01:37 PMWHY is there a disparity in outcome when we’ve established, factually, that the opportunity was the same?
We have absolutely no trouble when someone who is 5’1” tall and lean gets chosen as the head ballerina over someone 6’ and fat. We understand that the 6’ fat person is out of luck when it comes to becoming a Prima Donna. Conversely, someone 6’5” and 350 lbs is going to be chosen as linebacker over someone 5’4” and skinny. If we recognize and accept that outer qualities (size, weight, etc.) make a difference in some professions, without attributing it to racism, sizism, or any form of bigotry, why do we want to discount that there are factors INSIDE (such as intelligence) that explain why some people are better at certain things, and more likely to be successful?
We all know the evil past and intentions of the Eugenics folks, but is it possible to look at these things, and actually learn from them, allowing us to help people choose careers where they’re more likely to be successful? We so quickly fear closing the door to folks who’d be willing to try really hard, and apply themselves, but if we know, based on these other factors, that the chances are zilch they’d be able to do it, isn’t that cruel?
If you would find it acceptable to have counseled me, at age 15 (at 280 lbs and 6’1” tall) that ballet would not be a reasonable career choice, would you not also find it acceptable to counsel a person with an IQ of 90 to avoid Chemical Engineering or Medical School?
Choosing the easy answer, I’d say “follow the money.” If we conclude that blaming the schools for the “less than equal” outcome of minority groups gets them more funding, that would be one example of proof where helping people wasn’t the real goal. If we really want to help people to be successful, using whatever talents and abilities they actually have, rather than the talents and abilities we want everyone to have, then doesn’t that prove that it’s all about money, and greed, rather than the more noble goal of making American a place that really does believe and practice equality?
The irony of this is that the socialists could actually make a better case for the distribution of wealth if they could handicap (like Golfers) people based on lower intelligence. They would not, however, get all the attention of the mainstream media, and keep their seats on dramatic coalitions.
IQ has meaning. It does tell us things and enable us to predict outcomes. But we’re not allowed to do that. We can only look at outcomes and scream “RACISM!” we aren’t allowed to actually consider and explain the disparities.
Posted by Mrs. du Toit on 12/09/2004 at 01:38 PMI’ve had that conversation, and been accused of self aggrandizement, arrogance, and insensitivity many times.
Some folks assume that the very intelligent (or those that think they are) sit around all day congratulating themselves on how smart they are.
The mean of the various IQ tests I’ve had comes out to about 180, the lowest was 157. According to the most recent numbers I’ve seen, there are somewhere between 6000, and 60000 people smarter than me in the world (gotta love those orders of magnitude eh).
That and $4.50 gets you a starbucks latte.
My intelligence is a fact of my life. I’m very proud of my capability, but my raw intelligence is no big deal to me. I generally don’t make a thing out of it, and when I mention it it’s as an interesting fact, or most frequently to explain why I was able to come up with an answer in the way I have (Im a bit of a trivia nut and frequently come out with weird correct answers to weird obscure questions). I can’t imagine being any other way, and I just dont think about it on a daily basis.
As you, and the Mrs. have pointed out in the past, the highly intelligent really do think differently, and others often find it disconcerting. They may even be hostile to your ideas, no matter how they are presented, because of their own insecurity about intelligence. They may percieve you as arrogant. They may become self righteous.
Such is life.
Our society has a love hate relationship with intelligence. Clearly it is one of the highest commercially valued attributes. The very intelligent are in general higher valued by society than the less intelligent.
The intellectual elite certainly shout the praises of the highly intelligent, since of course they percieve themselves to be highly intelligent(often correctly; intelligence has little to do with common sense or factual reality).
On the other side, the intelligent are often looked on with self righteous indignation. “how dare they think they’re better than us”. Or we are geeks, freaks, weirdos (and I am, and I celebrate this fact) etc…
We mock the intelligent, we parody them, we have many derogatory stereotypes etc… Some discriminate against them. Some dont want to work with them.
We as a society are simply not comfortable with what we do not understand. The highly intelligent are therefore in a position where they understand more than most others, which makes many of those people uncomfortable, even resentful or fearful.
Unfortunately making this relationship worse, many very intelligent people are exactly what the rest of the world hates about us: they are arrogant and overbearing, they have poor social skills, they have little regard for others feelings etc…
Again, such is life.
The thing that angers me about all of this is those that pretend that either intelligence is not a factor, or that it is somehow unfair that some are more intelligent than others.
I ask, “How is it unfair using what god or nature or my parents gave me?”
So then they get into veil of ignorance or inherent value bullshit, which they almost invariably use to justify why I should be artificially handicapped against others, to “level the playing field”.
Excuse the vulgarity but, fuck you. Go read Harrison Bergeron and then please fuck off and die.
Posted by Chris Byrne on 12/10/2004 at 01:04 AMWhoa, Chris: If you’re having a bad night, Vonnegut is probably not the ticket, though according to Ida Mae Gompers, the Handicapper General, he’s required reading. (grin)
Mrs. DuToit: I always get a lot out of what you write—pick away! (grin)
If I can distill everything down to a nub, it sounds like you’re arguing that low IQ scores are attributable not to testing bias, but to testee’s genetics, circumstances, and/or character.
I agree. In fact, that was the point I was making at the end of my earlier comment. That if groups consistently underperform, we need to ask why.
Once we understand why, we can talk about fixing the situation—the first goal being to eliminate residual inequities from our systems. As you say, to make sure opportunities are really equal on the input side. Beyond this, we may want to take further action to insure that some special circumstances are compensated—more to accelerate the process and get us out of the woods a little faster than because the groups we’re dealing with are “victims” who deserve special treatment.
That’s probably where we should stop. Going much further means making people wards of the state and getting into their heads too deeply. You have to leave room for character to assert itself, and for people to earn—or fail to earn—their way out of the pit.
I still think this leaves lots of work for everyone before America is the paradise of universal equal opportunity our PR says it is. And the path to that lies somewhere between the classic liberal view ("throw money at it until outcomes are equal") and the classic conservative view ("open the doors to everyone, and otherwise let people go to Hell in their own way").
Speaking of character: I think a crucially important aspect of the character-picture is a sense of entitlement. Not to benefits, but “entitlement to learn.” Or rather, more precisely, “entitlement to think in a certain, unnatural way associated with particular subject matter.”
Years ago, when I was teaching math in NYC public schools, I had a reputation for turning bad students into competent algebraists. And most of this turned on a deal I made with students. I would sit them down, individually, at the beginning of the year, and say: “Look—we’re going to be reading this book and doing these problems, right? And these problems are nothing like you see in the real world. And it may seem pretty stupid to be ‘smart’ about this stuff. And I know the last thing you want is for your friends to find out you’re some kind of Braniac about math. So the deal is—while you’re in class, and while you do homework, you have my special permission to think about math, figure it out, write down questions and talk to me about them when your friends aren’t around. And when we do tests, I will show you your scores in private and not mark them on your papers. So your friends will never know how smart you are.”
And this rambling diatribe actually worked. Maybe 80-85% of these kids just took right off like rockets, slammed through the book, lost their math-fear (which was really a combination of social anxieties about ‘thinking differently from those around me’) and generally did well. Which I’ve always felt said something profound about the social aspect of learning, and how groups hold individuals back, or conversely, not just ‘free them to excel,’ but virtually guarantee their success.
Posted by on 12/10/2004 at 04:31 AMAHA! Your Curmudgeon gets to correct one of his brainy, highly-educated commenters! The Handicapper-General in Vonnegut’s famous story “Harrison Bergeron” was Diana Moon Glampers, John. Interestingly, Vonnegut used that character name twice: once in that short story, and once for a minor character in his early novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
But getting back onto the central point for just a moment, it strikes your Curmudgeon as unwise to infer, because a group of youngsters can be taught a body of knowledge that was previously considered beyong their capacity, that the overall applicability of objectively measurable generalized intelligence is called into question. Apposite to this point are the well documented declining standards of the schools this century past, best illustrated by the many tests one can find on-line that were once given to eighth-graders, but which few college graduates could pass today.
Much of the reluctance to acknowledge that some of us are inherently smarter than the others is rooted in a form of generosity that has no set name: a sort of all-enfolding altruistic wish for everyone to be as well-off as we. Call it a socialism of the heart. It’s praiseworthy, but it would be imprudent to premise too much on it. As William F. Buckley once said, “Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the cost becomes prohibitive.”
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 12/10/2004 at 08:12 AMPut into inanimate terms, the human brain is born without any software, and only an incomplete operating system. We all get to program our own brains as we grow, with some completely disparate results. Thus, some of us have great spatial reasoning, while others have superior logical faculties, and still others of us have sharp and commodious memories. Numerical ability tends to compete with language ability, so that few of us have both in abundance.
Thus a single method of ranking “intelligence” will always leave some of us, who have very supple and superior brain power, with a lower “I.Q.” rating. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird might have low I.Q. scores, but are absolute geniuses in spatial reasoning, and have great hand-eye coordination. But. While there only a few hundred players of basketball who make large incomes from it, there are literally millions of people with high I.Q. scores who make large incomes from that facility of logic and memory that makes for a high I.Q.
It may make some of us feel good to speak of a world with equality of outcome, and even more of us to speak of equality of opportunity, but the plain fact is that these desires are always stymied by the fact that humans are always involved. The human character and spirit will never allow such a world. In fact, all those humans who espouse such a world either believe themselves so superior that they are confident that their inherent superiority will continue to place them above the average in such a world, or so downtrodden that they have nothing to lose. The masses of people in the middle will never allow such a world to be created. Have we learned nothing in the last hundred years from the failure of ALL of the utopian movements in this world? We can hope for such a world, but we must not fool ourselves that it might ever come into being.
Humans will always seek to dominate their brothers, and arrogate more that their fair share of food, goods, women, etc. - even though a few of us have created mental software that can not understand why this is true. So sorry John. Your heart is in the right place, but you have the task of Don Quixote before you. Do your algebra whizzes have more income than their brothers who were not so fortunate as to have had you as their math teacher? We can not know, but I suspect not. I suspect that success in school is inferior to the outcome of a lifetime love of learning - which can not be taught. Your crafty tactic of allowing the facts of I.Q. testing while downplaying the relative meaning of the results fails to explain why all demographic groups that score highly on I.Q. also score highly on commercial success, family togetherness, avoidance of substance abuse and criminality. The world might just be a better place if this were not true, and we were all more equal, but, as Spock said, things always become more complicated, whenever humans are involved.
Posted by Michael Gersh on 12/10/2004 at 09:02 AMOoh! Diana Moon Glampers ... right. Well, it was late, and I chose not to Google it. Darn. And the image of her, fuming as the hero and heroine throw off their sandbags, embrace, and rise into the empyrean is so vivid. She shot them, of course. (grin)
You’re (all of you) right. I don’t at all believe that the brief influence of a single teacher can inculcate a lifelong love of learning or insure lifetime success (myths to the contrary), or even raise IQ scores; much less call into question the validity of objective testing. Obviously, I’m talking about meagre anecdotal experience, here—not controlled study. Without that, you can’t be sure what buttons were being pressed (i.e., maybe the kids worked harder because they liked the fact that I used the word ‘Braniac,’ right?) It’s dangerous to romanticize or overinterpret.
Still, I find thought-provoking the fact that scores on standardized tests can be improved, sometimes dramatically, by practice in ‘test-like problem-solving’ and discussion of test-taking strategy. And I find intriguing the idea that—in some cases—failure to learn (or perform competently) may be ameliorated by going far afield from the subject-matter and discussing social things, more or less in the manner of psychotherapy. It’s also interesting that—in my isolated experience, at least—the key intuition seems to have been connected to a need for anonymity, which provokes at least the question whether failure-to-perform syndromes share additional psychic DNA with addiction disorders, and might be controlled efficiently by simple, cost-free, voluntary “step"-type programs in the AA model.
No takers? I’d figure a group that spends so much time wondering how ostensibly ‘smart’ liberals can be so stupid (resistant to facts, logic, challenging ideas and novel arguments) would be rather taken by a theory of intelligence that speaks to the mental health (read: moral character) of groups and individuals, or its converse: a theory of stupidity that hinges on social dysfunction and individual neurosis.
C’mon ... you know you like it! (grin)
Posted by on 12/10/2004 at 01:43 PM“I don’t at all believe that the brief influence of a single teacher can inculcate a lifelong love of learning ...” - John
Looking back at several influential teachers I had, I’m not certain I agree with the first part of your sentance there, John. I had a number of them early that to my [admittedly subjective] view, did have a major hand in inculcating a lifelong love of learning in me.
The second part, yeah… no one can “nsure lifetime success (myths to the contrary), or even raise IQ scores” - you have to work for success based on the tools one is given.
But good teachers and mentors can definately help to ensure you have good tools, up to the limits of your ability to assimilate them.
Posted by Ironbear on 12/10/2004 at 10:32 PM
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