Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

How you did in school is not a measure of intelligence

Accord­ing to our edu­ca­tion sys­tem, I’m smarter than a lot of other peo­ple.  I know it isn’t true, but I’m not going to turn down awards, schol­ar­ships, and ego boosts by giv­ing an accep­tance speech by say­ing it’s all bunk.  But it is.

Our edu­ca­tion sys­tem, as it is cur­rently con­structed, is a game.  If you know how to play the game, you get bet­ter marks, which gives you rewards.  The assump­tion is that if you have bet­ter marks, you are:

• more intel­li­gent
• more capa­ble
• more wor­thy

It’s not true at all.  Marks are but one pos­si­ble mea­sure of what a per­son knows and what they can do.  My brain works the way that seems to match what the school sys­tem — from pri­mary school through to uni­ver­sity — is look­ing for.  But I will admit to you that there are a lot of areas where I’m dumb as a pile of rocks.  And I know there are peo­ple who are smart and excel in the very areas where I’m useless.

Intel­li­gence is not about how well you can do math­e­mat­ics, ana­lyze sci­en­tific prob­lems, and com­pose ele­gant papers.  Yes, those skills are impor­tant if you are going into finance, med­i­cine, aca­d­e­mics, engi­neer­ing, or sci­en­tific research.  But is that all the world is about?  Is that all that is worthwhile?

I don’t believe it is.  There is a lot more to the world than sci­ence, med­i­cine, aca­d­e­mics, and finance.

But aren’t these the only ways a per­son can make a ton of money and be con­sid­ered “suc­cess­ful” by society’s most preva­lent stan­dard?  Not necessarily.

I’ll have more to say on this topic in the future, but let me share with you an inter­est­ing, enter­tain­ing, and thought-provoking speech:

I’m a smart per­son.  But so are many of the folks who didn’t excel in school.  It’s a shame that our edu­ca­tion sys­tem and our soci­ety would ever let kids and peo­ple who didn’t excel in school think otherwise.