Here’s a brief quiz, with examples inspired by particular students I have worked with. Which of the following pairs is more intelligent?
- Someone who can read a book and analyze the plot or someone who can fix a car that has broken down?
- Someone who can solve complex math equations or someone who can choreograph and perform a complex dance routine?
- Someone who can build a shed or someone who can write a play?
- Someone who can listen to and help a friend, or someone who can write code?
It’s a lot more complicated than it might seem, and how we define intelligence has had (and continues to have) significant consequences for students and for public education.
Early research and the influence of eugenics
Intelligence is abstract; it’s not a thing you can hold in your hand or weigh on a scale, so when we say that someone is intelligent, or more intelligent than someone else, what are basing that on? Alfred Binet was a French psychologist who, along with Theodore Simon, developed the first intelligence test in 1905. Binet’s interest was to help teachers have a better understanding of how to work with students who were labeled as “sub normal,” who could not keep up in French classrooms.
U.S. psychologists Edward Thorndike, Naomi Norsworthy, Henry Goddard and Lewis Terman, all believers in eugenics, were also developing methods to measure at the same time, but they took that work in a very different direction.
Eugenicists claimed some races (northern and western Europeans) were superior because they had better genes and all other races had inferior genes, which meant they were less intelligent and were responsible for crime and social ills. Eugenicists believed that they could perfect human beings through the breeding of those with “superior” genes, and by eliminating or limiting the birthrates of those from so-called inferior groups. This theory led to the enforced sterilization of between 60,000 and 70,000 people, policies such as the Immigration Act of 1924 that excluded Asian immigration, Jim Crow laws in the South, segregation, and the miseducation and warehousing of students in school basements, since they were deemed too feeble-minded to learn anything. This ideology also led to much of the horrors carried out in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Eugenics meets intelligence testing
The IQ or intelligence quotient measurement, created by Wilhelm Stern (who was not a eugenicist), made it possible to compare people’s performance on tests. Terman and his colleagues “weaponized” the IQ, using it to “prove” their theory that some races were superior. While their tests were racially and culturally biased, they insisted that the superior scores of certain races were the result of their superior genetic makeup.
One of the early uses of intelligence testing came during World War I. Eugenicist Robert Yerkes persuaded the army to use intelligence testing to determine which recruits would become officers and which infantry, with predictable results. Those from northern and western European backgrounds tended to score higher and became officers; others became infantry and were shipped into the middle of the death and destruction of that war.
Problems and limits of IQ testing
IQ was accepted as an objective and accurate measure of intelligence through the first half of the 20th century. The kinds of intelligence assessed by the IQ test became the definition of intelligence, and this played an outsized role in how schools were organized, how curriculum was developed, who succeeded at school, and how people with learning or mental health challenges were assessed. Those whose strengths mirrored the material on the tests were deemed intelligent, and those whose strengths did not align with that narrow band measured by the IQ were discounted, devalued and labeled as failures.
Critics began to challenge the validity of the IQ in the 1950s and ’60s. They noted that the IQ tests were racially and culturally biased, and did not consider socioeconomic factors that played a significant role in people’s lives. There was an increasing push to rethink and to broaden the definition of intelligence beyond the IQ.
The damage done
The dominating view of intelligence as seen through the eugenics lens has done great harm.
- Students who are labeled as “smart” or “not smart” have a hard time shaking those labels, and it also influences how others view and work with them. The stereotype of people of color, particularly African Americans and Native Americans, being less intelligent is an example of the harm that has been done; there is no evidence to support a difference in intelligence from one race to another.
- It ignores talents and skills that fall outside the realms that are tested and valued. Creativity is shut down, and those who think differently are also shut down and pressured to conform.
- It contributes to our mental health crisis, as students who do not match up with the narrow recipe for success are blamed for their failures.
- Immigrants and others from the so-called inferior races become scapegoats, blamed for society’s problems.
More recent understanding of the nature of intelligence
Research in the latter half of the 20th century has brought an understanding that there is no single measure of intelligence, that intelligence can change over time and in different situations, and that, the more we learn about how the brain works, the more we realize that “intelligence” involves the whole brain and the whole person in a particular context rather than a narrow, static, measurable slice of a person.
Psychologist Howard Gardner, who published his multiple intelligence theory in 1983, found that there is not one overriding intelligence, but that we are a collection of what he identified as discreet, individual intelligences. He identified eight of them: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic. Gardner’s theory states that everyone has a unique combination of all eight intelligences; there is no one measure that encompasses them all.
Robert Sternberg developed his triarchic theory two years later, saying that intelligence has three aspects: analytical, creative and practical. Analytical intelligence refers to intelligence that is applied to analyze or evaluate problems and arrive at solutions; it’s what a traditional IQ test measures. Creative intelligence involves imagination, innovation and problem-solving. Practical intelligence is the ability that individuals use to solve problems faced in daily life.
Other theories have emerged since, all supporting a broader and more complex definition of intelligence, and advances in neuroscience confirm that there is no simple, single, universal measurable definition.
What does this mean?
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, in his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” argues that oppressive leaders maintain dominance by claiming the exclusive right to define what is “good,” “intelligent” and “valuable.” We are living through such a period now in the U.S. The president, in his attacks on experts and science, on the arts, on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and on anyone who disagrees with him, is engaging in what Freire called cultural invasion — attempting to impose his values, views and definitions on the country. These attacks have a profound impact on how we view and value intelligence, education and each other.
Primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall famously said, “We’re not intelligent, because intelligent creatures don’t destroy their only home.” There are so many ways to be intelligent, and we desperately need them all to face the many crises before us. Our children bring all those intelligences to our schools, and our challenge is to support and nurture them so they can arrive at the full realization of who they are, what their gifts are and how they can bring those gifts to their families, communities and the world.
Doug Selwyn taught at K-12 public schools from 1985 until 2000, and then at university as a professor of education until he retired in 2017. He is the chair of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution education task force. You can reach him at dougselwyn12@gmail.com.