Intelligence And Education

Part One: What is intelligence?

"Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence." -- Bertrand Russell.

Though deluged with shot and shell by the academic Left, the classical view of intelligence -- the ability to manipulate data and related abstractions for particular purposes -- continues to stand. Nonsense notions like "emotional intelligence" and similar attempts to fuzz the concept have provoked only titters from serious students of cerebration.

To understand intelligence, one must understand categories and concepts, and how they are formed: the process of abstraction. To manipulate concrete data without the use of abstractions is merely to shuffle toys in a toy chest. The ability to grasp abstractions, the ability to taxonomize -- to recognize concrete items as belonging to certain categories but not to others -- and above all, the ability to use categories and concepts of cause-and-effect to reach testable conclusions, are the heart of intelligence.

Pioneering cyberneticist Gregory Bateson arrived at the conclusion that any bit of information is a difference: a contrast between two things. To form a category is to sort things according to some difference among them. To form a concept is to posit the result of a specified interaction between items in specified categories. The smarter a man is, the better he is at these operations of the mind.

But let's not omit the need for testable conclusions. What do you do with a testable conclusion? Why, you test it, of course. And if repeated testing proves it to be incorrect, what then? Do you discard the results, muttering "there has to be something wrong with the data," or do you question your theory?

The Russell quote above this essay suggests that one path is preferable to the other.

Here we come to the forgotten operation of intelligence: the recognition, assessment, and correction of mistakes. An intellectual mistake is of one of two kinds:

• An incorrect premise,

• An inaccurate inference, whether because the chosen model of cause-and-effect was wrong, or because it was applied outside its proper context.

It takes quite a lot of smarts to find and fix one's own mistakes. Beyond this, it helps if one isn't emotionally wedded to one's theories. This is why scientists use peer review.

In the practical world, where we're after satisfactions of a more tangible kind than theoretical confirmation, we tend to judge a man by his results. We don't hold his mistakes against him, if he recognizes and corrects them. If he consistently gets the results he strives for, we rate him smarter than others who do less well with comparable intellectual challenges. The opinions of radical academics to the side, results, like words, do have meaning.

There is also this: Deconstruction and Marxist political theories have never shot down an attacking bomber, nor will they help you to figure your return on investment or compare it to the prospects from other business opportunities. Out here where these things matter, where reality tests our concepts whether we like it or not, and where mistakes have to be recognized and fixed before someone gets hurt, a man who can do these things is rightfully regarded as smart enough to be President of the United States.

Part Two: Education and the development of intelligence.

If we see intelligence as a generalized ability to deal with abstractions, it becomes proper to ask what its relation is to education, which has traditionally been regarded as a process of acquisition of specific kinds of knowledge. I think it self-demonstrating that some degree of intellect is required for the mastery of any field more abstract than a multiplication table. The fascinating question is the inverse one: what degree of education is required to coax the intellect to its full flower?

The longstanding view is that education is to the intellect as exercise is to the muscles: the stress provided by study stimulates the mind to grow strong. In the study of specific fields, the mind acquires even more general powers, that would allow it more readily to master still other fields. Experience tends to confirm this view.

Of course, each of us has limits, intellectual as well as physical. What sets those limits may be a matter of debate, but their existence is not. Just as no amount of patient tutelage will teach calculus to a horse, no amount of effort will enable certain persons to master certain abstruse fields. They don't have the innate intellectual horsepower, and cannot acquire it. There's a whole side discussion implicit here, on the proper matching of educational opportunities to individuals according to their demonstrated capabilities, but we'll pass over that for now.

The intellect-expanding role of education is often glossed over or ignored completely. (We might call this the "trade school" approach to education: nothing matters but that you come out of your classes able to operate a power lathe, or cite historical events by date.) In fact, it is the more important aspect of education, far more important than the specific knowledge acquired, for no education, however complete, can prepare a man in detail for all the challenges ordinary life will hurl at him. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, one of the military geniuses of his day, once said to a class, "Regulations are all very well for drill, but in the hour of danger they are of no more use.... you have to learn to think."

What are we to make of "education" that doesn't strengthen the mind? Education that confers neither specific, usable knowledge nor expanded mastery of abstraction? Education that renders the mind resistant to the core concepts of reality and society: knowable facts and objective truth?

Sad to say, there's a lot of it going around.

Part Three: Modern "education" and the diminution of intellect.

Before we get into the subject: It's possible for someone like me to launch into a screaming tirade on this subject, so I'm going to exercise a lot of restraint here. If you find yourself agreeing with me, I hope you can hold your emotions in check about it; it's often quite difficult.

One of the trends of the present day is the progressive abandonment of children's education to the hands of a cadre of professional educators. Pressed as we are for time and energy, the temptation to farm out this long, difficult process to others will overwhelm many of us.

Unfortunately, these "educators" usually don't share our priorities or concerns. Many of them don't share our moral values, and a significant number will tell you to your face that education needn't concern itself with those things. Many are more concerned with personal agendas than with the welfare of the young minds we entrust to them. And in the government-run schools, all, without exception, are insulated from any consequences of their actions.

This is a formula for disaster. I submit that the disaster is in progress, and that its fruits are all around us, in the shape of millions of public-school graduates who can barely speak English and can't handle abstract reasoning at all. Worse yet, the majority of these victims of the State school monopoly are quite satisfied to be what they are; the articulate ones among them will tell you defiantly that there's no such thing as truth or objective fact.

In Part One above, I noted the importance of recognizing and correcting one's mistakes, a process so intrinsic to human life that God Himself could not remove it. The motivation for the process comes from the negative consequences of the mistakes: the pain and loss that result from wrongly-conceived or poorly-executed action. If this is removed from a man's path, such that he may err without personal consequence, he will err into infinity, for there will be nothing to counterbalance the humiliation and pain-of-growth that accompany admitting to a fault.

They who run government schools have succeeded in averting any consequence of their actions from landing on their shoulders. Indeed, their accelerating failure -- by our standards -- is the linchpin of their demands for more money and more authority.

Many side investigations branch out from this point:

• The Progressive education movement,

• The self-esteem movement,

• Deemphasis of the classical standards of education in favor of modern fads that will be entirely forgotten in ten years' time,

• Teachers miseducated by their education professors,

• Teachers who are themselves anti-academic and anti-knowledge,

• The burgeoning inclusion of non-academic material into school curricula,

...and so forth. But all of these fall into a single conceptual bin: error. Error about the mission of education, the mechanics of it, and the proper roles of educators, parents, and children. Error about the standards we must apply to knowledge and reasoning. Error about the nature of the mind and of reality itself.

To deal with error requires that it be recognized, analyzed, and corrected. The government-run schools have no incentive to endure this painful, humiliating process, having shed all the consequences of their actions. The people who work for them will do whatever it takes to keep that aspect of things unchanged.

To compel them to work as they were originally intended to work would require that parents and children accept even heavier burdens than attending to their own educations: the burden of being cast as villains for criticizing the "essential" and "invaluable" public school system; the burden of pressuring legislators for changes in education law, against the opposition of the country's wealthiest and most powerful special interests; the burden of forcing permanent constitutional changes to protect education at the state and federal levels. Inasmuch as the dynamic of political power confers permanent advantages on those inside the school bureaucracy, the task is impossible.

At this time, only flight makes any sense. And it is both right and necessary, if you value your children's minds.