Max Mckeown

What kind of intelligence do you need?

What kind of intelligence do you want? IQ is just a measure of a particular kind of efficiency in brain design. That’s important for doing IQ type tasks but what happens when you want to complete a task that IQ doesn’t measure?

Howard Gardener[i] is among many who have examined what he termed ‘multiple intelligence’. His first attempt identified seven ‘intelligences’ that contribute to our societies success: Musical, Logical, Spatial, Bodily, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal. He later added naturalistic which is the ability to recognise and classify objects in the environment that in adults might mean plants, minerals, and animals but in children might start with the ability to cultural artefacts like cars and sneakers. Not the kind of thing that IQ (and IQ based aptitude tests) value at all with damaging impacts on the way that people are valued like the following example:

“I feel as if I’ve been shrunk down to pea size by an experience I had last week whilst filling in an on-line application form for a job. I got to the section where it wanted to know how I did at high school but I thought this was OK as I think I have proved my abilities in my university years. So, I type 14, my number of UCAS points (gained through the UK examination system) into the required box. The next thing I know I am taken to a page that read: “Sorry, you do not meet our entry requirements. Your application has been unsuccessful”. I had been shrunk to the number 14.”

What do you expect of those whom you work with, or for those who work for you? That includes students for teachers, teachers for student, employers for employees, employee for employers, men for women, women for men, parents for children, and children for their parents. In a way, that we cannot perhaps entirely explain the belief of another person changes what they do for us and what we will do from that point on.

When you see no hope of improvement, will you intervene to help that person or that situation improve? Nine times out of ten, you will not. The average person would not try to achieve something he thinks is unachievable. But how does he decide what is possible and what is not? We ask ourselves whether anyone else has ever done it, whether anyone else thinks we can do it, whether we are getting the help we need to do the impossible.

When we divide the world into successes and failures, those who can and those who never will, we stop working for the good of those supposedly ‘hopeless cases’. Teachers have been found to, “cling to the belief that some students cannot learn, ” while others, ““with high expectations for all students, on the other hand, effectively translate their beliefs into more academically demanding curriculum.”[ii]

Has this ever happened to you? Did anyone ever decide that you couldn’t do something, and so reduce the teacher and the opportunities that were given to you? Have you ever made that decision for someone else? It can happen through racial stereotyping, with black children encouraged to do sport and music when they might rather do law or medicine. Every time it happens someone shrinks. They could have done more but now they might not.

What value could you see in the paralysed 9^th child of 22 siblings? Or in a boy whose childhood home was a hut with walls smoothed with cow dung in the African village of Qunu? Or in a poor, sexually abused, black girl who was pregnant at fourteen years old?  Or in a man who could only communicate by raising his eyebrows?

How about a gifted poet and artist? How about the leader who reversed the cultural and political structure of an entire country? How about the media phenomenon with an estimated personal fortune of more than $500million?  How about the esteemed academic and author of the best selling ‘A brief history of Time’?

Dyslexia has continued to be allowed to shrink those with the condition. Study after study has shown that if teachers lower their expectations for students with dyslexia so they leave school with poor reading and writing skills. They are penalised in the workplace, suffer from the symptoms of shrunken self-confidence, and are more likely to experience failure and frustration in all areas of their lives.

The prison population is 50 per cent more likely to be dyslexic than the general population. Some 85 per cent of those who are illiterate have dyslexia.[iii] And yet that dyslexic student may become the next Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, or Albert Einstein! You don’t know who you are teaching, interviewing, or managing until you have seen all that they can become.

When we consider how many kinds of intelligence we need, and how people each have different combinations, we can start to value supposed ‘disabilities’ and ‘limitations’ differently. We know that the average dyslexic person is more creative, blind person better at listening, and deaf person better with visual perception. Should dyslexia, blindness, deafness, and other ‘disabilities’ become positive qualifications?

(This excerpt is from Unshrink by Max Mckeown and Philip Whiteley)