For October’s event, Dr Jon Scaife joins us from the University of Sheffield to talk about The Tyranny of Intelligence – the idea that ability and intelligence are fictions.
Imagine you are a teacher and a seventeen year old wishes to join your night class. Her parents are addicted to heroin and cocaine and her mother is also an alcoholic. She was bullied at school before she was kicked out and then both of her parents died from AIDS. Would you let her join the class? What is the cost of taking her on? What are the likely benefits? In real life the girl was called Liz Murray and the teacher took her on. She did a year’s work in a term and in 2009, she graduated from Harvard University. This shows us
The teacher took a chance
In Liz’s words, “you don’t know, you just don’t know”
Charles Darwin spoke of “deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of senses or the hands” Clearly, even that far back, intelligence was seen as the zenith and we still persist with this intellectual snobbery today. He also talked about “man’s attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up” and “the average mental power of men must be above that of women” These views reflected those of his cousin, Francis Galton, who spoke of “an innate, intellectual, general and limited ability” There was an idea of fixed potential.
The idea that ability is innate goes all the way back to Socrates. In The Meno, he talks about “drawing out what’s within”, and in fact this is the original meaning of the word ‘education’ Even Plato was an innate-ist who believed that we should only be ruled by the most worthy. If it is innate, does this mean that it’s inherited? Do genes contain essences like intelligence or is our inheritance just saliences and values? Recent research shows the impact of epi-genetics has an influence – you can never separate nature from nurture.
The idea that ability is limited goes back to Cyril Burt in the 1950s. Burt was the first psychologist to be knighted for services to the field of psychology. He thought that each person is endowed with a degree of intelligence and we are born with something that we can’t change. Galton, Burt and their contemporary Spearman all used measurements to consolidate their accounts and give them scientific credibility. These were then reported in scores such as IQ. Although IQ tests were actually first given to the French military.
Here’s how an IQ test works:
A person is given some tasks
Their performance is assessed
It is assumed that their performance reflects their intelligence
In fact all that’s happened is that their performance in a specific test has been measured at a specific time. In fact no-one has ever actually measured intelligence. Under current proposals in parliament, students could end up being put into grammar schools on the basis of tests such as these.
When we use this discourse, it causes students to have expectations about themselves and others that quickly become self-fulfilling. And this doesn’t just apply to those viewed as being on the low end of the scale, labelling can also hurt high attainers. Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance. There is a systemic issue of a poverty of ambition that leads to schools focussing on scores and teachers have swallowed the dogma of being able to know ability.
Test scores tell you where somewhere is at, not where they could end up – a description of high or low attainment is a historical fact but low ability labelling is always only an inference and this is a potentially damaging label. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” – just because someone hasn’t shown a particular ability yet doesn’t mean that they don’t have it. For example, Wilma Rudolph won 100m, 200m and 4x100m gold at the 1960 Olympics in Rome despite having to wear an orthopaedic shoe in high school. Meanwhile John Gurdon was bottom of his biology class at Eton but won a Nobel prize in 2012.
In conclusion, each of us has our own set of abilities. Labelling people by ability undermines learning. Labelling attainment instead enables everyone to focus on growth. Ability labels are bad – can we do without them?
Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub returns to The Canalhouse on the 1st of November at 7:30pm where David Alnwick brings “Mind Wizard”, his show of misdirection, mind reading and manipulation. For more information, visit the SitP website: www.nottingham.skepticsinthepub.org
By Gav Squires
@GavSquires
