Whose Intelligence?

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
—UNCF

Before continuing with my series on “what are schools for?” I must offer a full confession: for my entire youth and much of my adult and professional life, I have been on what I now consider the wrong side of this post’s topic:  whose intelligences might we want to value in our schools?  A magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with multiple graduate degrees, I am the poster-child for valuing the traditional academic understanding of what it means to call someone intelligent.  Or to labor the obvious, I am a science teacher; I educate young people in an intellectual discipline for a living.  Hence, when it comes to exploring how our schools and society value—and devalue—the many different types of intelligence humans express in their lives, my historical bias is clear, and I just need to be forthright about that “elephant in my living room” before continuing.

But now, I want to explore “the powerful effect our assumptions about intelligence have on the way people are defined and treated in the classroom, the workplace, and the public sphere” (MW, p. xxxix)¹ and to examine the role our schools play in what types of intelligences our society chooses to value.  I want to unpack not only my own bias but those of our society to see how we might want to change our schools and move away from the “college-readiness” pipeline that has become the obsession of education reformers for the past twenty years and move toward the kind of “adulting-readiness” discussed in my previous posting, Why Schools?

Of course, whenever discussing the concept of intelligence, it is critical to remember that this feature of the brain is not a fixed value and that an individual’s IQ, EQ, and CQ are all malleable properties that can vary and change significantly over the course of a lifespan (see Chapter 3, Chapter 6, and Teaching Creativity).  Yet, what I want to challenge us also to remember is that a society’s understanding of intelligence is equally malleable and heavily influenced by historical place and time.  Indeed, “a society can validate some expressions of intelligence and award less merit to, even deny, others” (MW, p. 212), and in our own—where we have inherited from the Ancient Greeks the celebration of analytical reasoning over physical labor²—this “opposition of hand to brain” has led to theories of intelligence that “restrict, even categorically rule out, the possibility of the full expression of mind for whole groups of people” (MW, pp. 141 & 102).

No where do we see this more (nor worse) than among the working poor and those traditionally known as blue-collar workers.  In our society’s cultural contract, adults who wait tables, or cut hair, or stock shelves, or perform any of a host of other forms of physical labor for a living simply do not possess certain types of intelligence.  And since “judgments about intelligence carry great weight in our culture” (MW, p. xli), this alleged absence risks becoming attributed to an individual person’s character, with all the moral freight that comes with that.  As Trabian Shorters, founder and CEO of BMe Community, points out, the brain’s innate pattern mapping process can start to ascribe what are simply features of a person’s life at a given moment in time (e.g. waiting tables to meet financial need) to aspects of that person’s fundamental properties (“only smart enough to wait tables”).  The result is that our society’s valuation of certain types of intelligences over others can lead to harmful stereotyping, with all the socio-economic inequities that come with that.  Or as fellow educator, Mike Rose, at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies puts it, “the politics and power plays by which particular interest groups get one kind of work categorized as ‘skilled’ and another as ‘semi-skilled’ or ‘unskilled’ have significant economic and social consequences” (MW, p. xlvi).

Yet what the extensive research of Rose and others has shown is that “the world of everyday work provides a rich display of the kinds of mental activity long valued by those who study human thought” (MW, p. 201). The intelligences employed by those who do the “hand” work which our society devalues are no different in kind than those who do the “brain” work which our society so heavily rewards, and the memory skills needed to navigate a restaurant dinner rush, the design skills needed to craft a cabinet, the 3-dimensional reasoning needed to coif a client’s hair…these are merely three small examples from Rose’s own research which he uses successfully to refute our society’s artificial “hand-brain” division when it comes to understanding human intelligence. 

However, if the traditional “hand-brain” split is wrong and if we now have actual research refuting it, why do we continue to employ it—particularly in how we structure schools and education? Part of the answer, of course, is the cynical one that those in positions of power will do just about anything to remain in power (witness the current Republican-dominated state legislatures in action!), and from this standpoint, education in this country is all but deliberately designed to sort, divide, grade, and assign each person their “proper” socio-economic position in the system of wealth and white privilege. 

But part of the answer may also have to do with how we communicate about intelligence, and here, Rose suggests something I find intriguing.  He argues that what is missing when it comes to our understanding of the intelligences employed during “hand” work are the vocabularies we have already created to describe the intelligences used during “brain” work.  It is these missing terminologies, he claims, that keep our society from recognizing the wealth of mental activity employed during physical labor, and thus, it is limitations in our lexicon about whose intelligences we might value in our schools that contributes to the limitations in whose intelligences we actually do. Furthermore, because “the richness of [a school’s] program matches the perception of the capacity of the people who populate it” (WS, p. 180), schools found in communities where “hand” work dominates are structured accordingly, with the impoverished educational programs that simply reinforce the social separations of the cynical response to why we keep using the “hand-brain” division in the first place.  Or to paraphrase the work of the renowned Paulo Freire, what we cannot talk about, we cannot change.

Which is precisely the situation we find ourselves in with our current, massive cultural divides.  So not only does whose intelligences we value impact the quality of education and even the kinds of education offered in our schools; it impacts our ability to have meaningful dialogue around a whole host of social issues.  Hence, unless we start to value the full range of intelligences in our schools and the work that employs them, we face a great impasse moving forward as a nation.  Democracies flourish when all their citizens have a valued voice in the political and socio-economic “conversation,” and until we structure our schools to enable all intelligences to realize their full potential, we risk silencing everyone.

How we might do this restructuring is what I will explore next.

¹Because I will be referencing the research of Mike Rose from two different sources, I will be using the abbreviation “MW” for The Mind at Work and “WS” for Why School?

²It is worth noting as an aside that the Ancient Greeks’ “life of the mind” was built at the expense of an economy based nearly entirely on slave labor.

References

Fish, T. & Solomon, L. K. (Sept. 28, 2021) New View EDU Episode 8: Schools as Practice Zones for Adulting; An Interview with Julie Lythcott-Haims. National Association of Independent Schools. https://www.nais.org/learn/nais-podcasts/new-view-edu/episode-8-schools-as-practice-zones-for-adulting/

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  New York: Continuum Publishing Company.

Rose, M. (2014) The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.  New York: Penguin Books.

Rose, M. (2014) Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us.  New York: The New Press.

Shorters, T. (Feb. 3, 2022) A Cognitive Skill to Magnify Humanity.  On Being with Krista Tippett. https://onbeing.org/programs/trabian-shorters-a-cognitive-skill-to-magnify-humanity/.