I just came across an article in Scientific American reporting a speech by the very well-respected psychologist Robert Sternberg. Among other things, Sternberg has studied intelligence and wisdom.
His main point had to do with the relationship between academic testing and wisdom. He has evidence that while standardized academic tests successfully measure a number of useful variables, they are not well-related to wisdom. He believes that relying on those tests are gradually filtering out such other elements of intelligence as creativity and wisdom, in favor of the kind of knowledge that can be tested in standardized tests. He believes that if we change tests and admissions criteria to match the literature on wisdom and creativity, teachers (who, he says, will teach to the new tests) will begin to reverse the process.
There are really two ideas here: (1) standardized tests are creating a nation of what Sternberg called “smart fools”, and (2) improving tests will reverse the process. I’m interested in the first of these ideas.
We have become acutely aware that in America there has been a progressively increasing anti-education faction. We’ve seen this most clearly in the Trump phenomenon, although there are a number of other manifestations of it, from bean-counting publish or perish criteria for university researchers down to how admissions and scholarships are awarded. What I wonder is whether there could be a relation between standardized testing and the anti-education movement.
If Sternberg is correct, the non-college educated group must include an unknown number of people who were filtered out by academic tests used at every level of our education (beyond those simply don’t want to go to college). But what if testing is creating a division between conventionally intelligent people who may be neither creative or wise versus less smart people who may be creative and wise?
I believe that this follows, at least as a possibility, from Sternberg’s idea: a population of well-educated fools who get most of the jobs and leadership positions, along with a population of relatively uneducated savants who, with only a small number of exceptions, are for the most part left behind.
This adds a new element to the political dispute between pro- and anti-education fronts. It could be that the anti-education side may be wiser than we think they are. Things like creativity and even “folk wisdom” may be lacking to some extent from our elite and from our political leadership. The rage of the Trump voter (and the Tea Party before that) could have at least some element of justice on their side. Because they (or some of them) may lack the kind of abstract, cut-and-dry intelligence favored in standardized testing, we can’t know what they might have to offer the world in terms of wisdom. Denying the validity of their modes of thought because it is over-simplified or inadequately based on scientific consensus might be an error on our part, because wisdom can be valuable, even when it comes at things completely differently from how academic science might come at them. It might rely more on induction, for example, and on the global and the concrete rather than on the specific and the abstract: nonlinear, out of the box thinking.
If this is correct, then these under-educated savants are probably aware of their plight to some extent, and that would likely upset them and their friends and families greatly. Furthermore, they might find it more satisfying to limit their sphere of discourse to their fellows who were also filtered out of advanced education, to commiserate and perhaps also to discuss out what they could do about the situation. And so a movement is born.
I don’t really know if this is the case, but it was a thought I had.
Cheers,
Greg Shenaut