It’s commonly thought that people are ‘book-smart’ or ‘street-smart’. I remember so many students, acquaintances and even friends that were labelled as ‘dumb’ or ‘less intelligent’ as school progressed, and even if nobody said it, so many people thought it. Even now looking back, I recognize just how wrong an opinion it is, how such a limited array of intelligence school actually instils in an individual. And if there’s one thing I’ve learnt since my transition from academia to the workplace, it’s that knowledge is worthless if you don’t know how to use it practically outside of the confines of the classroom.
So what is intelligence? The Oxford Dictionary describes it as “The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skillsâ€. Wiktionary meanwhile describes it as “Capacity of mind, especially to understand principles, truths, facts or meanings, acquire knowledge, and apply it to practice; the ability to lean and comprehendâ€.
But what does this mean? In this writer’s opinion, intelligence is found in every person who can empathize, every person who can strategize, every person who can discuss and certainly every person can understand. If you have a sharp perception, an ability to argue effectively, an ability to discuss, devise tactics, display flexible (and most prominently, adaptive) thinking, surely you’re displaying far more intelligence than something that can just memorize information?
You see the problem with the current school system is that only a singular type of intelligence is needed to succeed: Memory. It doesn’t matter if you understand a concept, it doesn’t matter if you agree with it or not, all that matters is that you can memorize it and regurgitate it at a moment’s notice.
But if schools were to test an individual’s ability to empathize and sympathize then we’d have a greater amount of councillors and therapists to solve the world’s mental diseases. If schools were to test an individual’s ability to reason and discuss we’d have much sharper politics and much fairer judicial systems. If schools were to test adaptive thinking, tactical thinking, strategizing, we’d see far more small-time companies and enterprises starting up to fill the gaps in a struggling economy.
Do you agree that schools need to test more than just memory? Perhaps education needs to consider other types of intelligence more?
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