
Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius - dhimes
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39ferguson.htm?utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
======
GavinB
_Aren't there plenty of Ph.D.'s who can't fix their cars? Sure, but the
majority of them could learn if they were so inclined._

Inclination is a key component of effective intelligence. Saying "I could be
good at math if I was inclined towards it" is basically equivalent to saying
"I could be a big hit at parties if I was more charming" or "I could have a
good jump shot if I cared about practicing."

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
The truism in this article seems to be something like pg's hypothetical:

Imagine if aliens came to Earth, and told us that they'd destroy our planet
unless all the Physics PhDs got became experts in French Literature, and all
the French Literature PhDs because experts in Physics, and they gave us a year
to do it. The physicists would not be happy, but the French literature experts
would _really_ be scared.

 _[citation needed]_

~~~
cglee
I've been thinking a little about that example. And I really don't think it
gets at the core of the issue. The problem with that example is that academic
disciplines, whether it's due to an inferiority complex or what, have decided
to model themselves so much after the hard sciences, so that of course the
hard science experts are going to be able to study any of those disciplines
and acquire a PhD. It's because the programs were modeled after the hard
sciences.

Take a different example: if aliens came to earth and demanded that all PhD
physicists get as good at sculpting, drawing, and designing as the world's
foremost artists; and all the artists must acquire PhD's in physics. I'm not
sure who would do better as there's not a clear hierarchy between the
disciplines. They're different fields, catering to people with different
interests and talents.

~~~
caffeine
Indeed, among the physicists we might also find those who are moved to tears
by Baudelaire, and among the critics of French literature those unafraid of
contour integrals.

For every Terence Tao there are a thousand Nameless Toilers. So intelligence,
for most people, is not a rocket to ride but a bar to clear.

Then, given enough of a brain to be taught, the more important question: do
you have the stomach to learn?

------
kevinpet
He fails to draw the real crucial issue out -- by pretending that all children
have equal abilities, we try to force them all onto a track that only a third
of them will do well on.

A high school student is in a much better situation with a realistic
assessment of his abilities. If you struggle with math, you aren't much of a
conversationalist, and you have trouble remembering things, you would do well
to find a career that you can succeed at through nothing but persistence and
hard work. Also, you shouldn't borrow $50k to go to college.

~~~
ahoyhere
Is the putative student "bad at math" or "bad at math the way it's taught in
high school, perhaps even by a certain teacher"?

I thought I was bad at math and lived under that shadow for a very long time.
Then I grew up and realized I'm actually very good at math, I just had
terrible teachers/source materials.

All of these generalized statements are questionable by dent of gross
simplification.

PS - where is a university education only $50K?

~~~
a-priori
_where is a university education only $50K?_

Canada, as an example. Other places, such as many places in Europe, it's
"free" (i.e, publicly funded).

~~~
mediaman
America, too. Not everyone goes to $40k a year private schools. A degree from
an in-state school can be had for well within $50k.

~~~
menloparkbum
Are you sure? I thought this, too, but just checked out my home state's
University (Minnesota). It's a typical big state school and tuition and fees
for 4 years are pushing $45K. I was surprised because I assumed total tuition
was closer to $30K.

~~~
mediaman
University of Kansas clocks in at $29k for four years; UIC in Chicago is about
$25k (plus some fees that might bring it closer to 30). UMN does appear to be
pretty expensive relative to other schools for in-state tuition, but it's a
quite reputable school so maybe they've earned a premium.

~~~
menloparkbum
Hm. When I look at UIC's tuition calculator, it's giving me $6757 per semester
for undergrad engineering tuition and fees per semester. Over 8 semesters,
that's ~54K. Other departments are slightly cheaper but all were over
$6K/semester.

[http://www.uic.edu/depts/oar/undergrad/tuition_undergrad.htm...](http://www.uic.edu/depts/oar/undergrad/tuition_undergrad.html)

When I revisited UMN, it is $4200/semester... but that seems to be without
fees.

[http://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs_and_tuition/tuition_an...](http://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs_and_tuition/tuition_and_fees/index.html)

I first saw the UMN tuition on this site, which calculates it for the year:

[http://www.getreadyforcollege.org/sPagesGR/TuitionChart.cfm?...](http://www.getreadyforcollege.org/sPagesGR/TuitionChart.cfm?State=MN&pageID=101&1534-D83A_1933715A=7773465fb3fe383110b2c64181b8236e16a3a78c)

That's more time than I really wanted to spend on this topic, but I do find it
interesting that even state schools can cost way more than I would have
suspected.

------
frossie
I see a lot of statements here that are presented as fact that I don't believe
are substantiated (and in fact are contrary to my experience), such as
_However, clawing one's own way out of abject poverty is best achieved with a
healthy dose of both motivation and "g."_ and _An individual with low "g" is
going to struggle at both book learning and auto repair_.

I have seen people who appear to all extents and purposes thick as two planks
do marvels with engines. I have also seen people come out of poverty due to
purely personality trains (such a disinclination to spend money and a fear of
poverty) rather than any particular intelligence. Obviously we are talking
about otherwise normal people, not those who are pathologically mentally
challenged.

As to the whole "Not each child is secretly a genius", I don't know who thinks
that anyway. It is entirely proper that a parent sees and seeks the best in
the children but I don't think many really think their children are geniuses.
And you don't have to look too hard at the children of academics to understand
that a better aspiration for your children is to for them to be fulfilled and
content adults. While intelligence can somewhat help with that, I don't see
this as a stunningly obvious correlation.

~~~
tokenadult
_I see a lot of statements here that are presented as fact that I don't
believe are substantiated (and in fact are contrary to my experience)_

Agreed. For the benefit of readers of HN, I'll try to touch base with some of
my main factual disagreements with Ferguson. His text appears below in
quotation marks (except that some quotations from other authors in my replies
also appear in quotation marks) and my replies follow each block of quoted
text.

"A number of scholars, including L.L. Thurstone and more recently Robert J.
Sternberg, have argued that intelligence has been defined too narrowly."

Thurstone is deceased, but Sternberg is alive and well and still doing
research. And his books are very worthwhile for thought-provoking challenges
to mainstream g theory. (I should point out that I don't think I agree with
most of Sternberg's proposed alternative theory, but I appreciate his books

<http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html>

for their collections of articles by different authors.)

"Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, who won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius award"
in 1981, has had enormous influence, particularly in our schools.

"Briefly, he has posited that our intellectual abilities are divided among at
least eight abilities: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-
spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical, interpersonal, and
intrapersonal."

Everyone, including Gardner, agrees that much of the controversy surrounding
this proposal came from labeling these abilities "intelligences" rather than
"talents" when his book was first published in the 1980s. There is no doubt
whatever among any serious neuropsychologist or cognitive scientist that human
mental abilities are expressed in part as modules, but the dispute of the
submitted article is whether the modules can be connnected by an over-arching
general ability, summed up as g.

"More important, especially for education, it implicitly (although perhaps
unintentionally on Gardner's part) promises that each child has strengths as
well as weaknesses. With eight separate intelligences, the odds seem good that
every child will be intelligent in one of those realms."

Gardner, indeed, never makes such a promise, and Gardner is surprising NOT in
the camp of persons who personally believe in high malleability of human
abilities. Rather, Gardner thinks learners have a rather fixed endowment of
ability set primarily by genes, but influenced by opportunities for developing
in one domain or another. Some of what is said about Gardner's framework in
schools doesn't closely match what Gardner claims in his own writings.

"The movements that took flower in the mid-20th century have argued for the
essential sameness of all healthy human beings and for a policy of social
justice that treats all people the same."

My actual observation of the real-world behavior of schoolteachers is that
they are second to none in making excuses for poor educational results on the
basis of inherent limitations in learners. It may indeed be politically
correct among educational administrators to claim that all children can learn,
but most teachers believe--and in unguarded moments say--that many learners in
their care cannot achieve more than they already do.

"the idea that redefining the way we treat children will redefine their
abilities and future successes."

Surely how children are treated by others matters for something. It may be, as
Judith Rich Harris has suggested through her research, that peers are more
influential on children than parents are, but I've not recently heard anyone
advocate a policy of deliberate neglect of children.

"(Perhaps that's what leads some parents to put their faith in "Baby Einstein"
videos: the hope that a little nurturing television will send their kids to
Harvard.)"

Some parents surely believe something along these lines, because the baby
videos sell fairly well. There were better baby books (and phonograph
records?) long before Gardner first published, so I doubt he had much to do
with this. And, again, Gardner himself does not have this view of child
development.

"It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Gardner's work, both
in repudiating that elitist, unfair concept of "g" and in guiding thought in
psychology as it applies to education."

And it would be difficult to overestimate how much Gardner's personal views
are misrepresented by some people who claim his backing. A really good book
for understanding Gardner as of the year 1993 is

Bock, Gregory & Ackrill, Kate (Eds.) (1993). The Origins and Development of
High Ability. (Ciba Foundation Symposium 178). New York: Wiley.

The The Origins and Development of High Ability is a symposium volume
collecting commissioned articles. Each article is followed by fascinating
verbatim discussion transcripts in which the authors draw out the implications
of one another's ideas. Gardner argues strenuously for a much limited view of
malleability there than I thought he personally held.

"The only problem, with all respect to Gardner: There probably is just a
single intelligence or capacity to learn, not multiple ones devoted to
independent tasks."

The evidence that Gardner appealed to in his first book, such as brain-injured
patients with selective deficits in learning, is a familiar line of evidence
for cognitive modularity. A good recent discussion of cognitive modularity can
be found in What Intelligence Tests Miss,

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852)

a book I've cited to HN before by a psychologist well familiar with the
mainstream psychometric tradition and its limitations.

"To varying degrees, some individuals have this capacity, and others do not."

Is the statement here that some people have NO capacity to learn?

"To be sure, there is much debate about Gardner's theory in the literature,
with contenders for and against. Nonetheless, empirical evidence has not been
robust. While the theory sounds nice (perhaps because it sounds nice), it is
more intuitive than empirical. In other words, the eight intelligences are
based more on philosophy than on data."

I can agree with this statement that Gardner's grouping of "intelligences" has
not been firmly established (just as I agree that Sternberg's triarchic theory
of mind is not firmly established either) without being forced to think that g
theory is the most accurate description of human cognitive abilities.

"By contrast, a wealth of evidence supports the existence of 'g,' which,
contrary to the claims (or wishes) of some people, remains a strong predictor
of academic performance, job performance--particularly in highly technical
careers or those requiring decision making--and other markers of 'success.'"

High IQ scores (what Ferguson is really talking about when he mentions g) are
fairly strongly correlated with success in school. Success in school, in turn,
is reasonably strongly correlate with success at entry into certain
occupations, and those occupations in turn are somewhat correlated with high
income and other marks of "success." But the direction of causation is not
completely clear, because many highly able young people of low family income
are unable to pursue higher education,

<http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf>

[http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....](http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap.pdf)

<http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html>

and a sociologist who examined the data from the Terman longitudinal study
suggested that the Terman study subjects were underachievers compared to their
advantageous socioeconomic status (Ceci 1996, citing Sorokin (1956).

"Another issue with the theory of multiple intelligences is that too many of
the categories correlate too highly with one another to be separate
intelligences. Cognitive performance on skills related to verbal-linguistic,
logical-mathematical, and visual-spatial tasks, as well as many memory tasks,
tends to be highly related. In other words, it goes back to 'g.'"

But many skills related to actual item-content performance on IQ tests are
poorly correlated one with another, especially at high levels of IQ. Terman
discovered this as he developed a new edition of his Stanford-Binet IQ test:
"However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted
for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped.
Figure 3 is typical of the arrays at every age level.

"From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is
not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It
has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater
I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see
that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been
predicted on logical grounds. (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44)"

"The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive
skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical
represents an affinity for music;"

This will sound totally bogus to anyone well acquainted with skilled
musicians, as I am as the husband of a piano teacher.

"Only bodily-kinesthetic--the ability to manipulate one's own body with
dexterity--may truly represent a separate cognitive ability, probably stemming
from cerebellar activity involved in fine motor control."

There do seem to be good grounds for claiming that "athletic ability" or
"coordination" or whatever you call it is orthogonal to the skills tapped by
IQ tests, but it is plainly brain-based, and has as much claim to be called a
cognitive ability as any of the skills underlying the tasks required in a
typical IQ test.

"Finally, as Waterhouse noted in her exchange with Gardner, the theory of
multiple intelligences has little value for clinical testing of intelligence
or the prediction of future performance. 'G' alone is highly predictive of
both academic and work success."

Here is where we especially see that Ferguson sets up Gardner as a straw man,
rather than grappling with current authors who expand the theory such as
Stanovich. There is much evidence

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852)

that high-IQ individuals can make spectacular, harmful cognitive errors,
because IQ tests don't tap important human cognitive abilities that Stanovich
sums up as "rationality."

"Despite some naysayers (think of Richard E. Nisbett's Intelligence and How to
Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, published this year by Norton),"

Notice the total absence of response to Nisbett's recent book. I'm reading it,
and I appreciate Nisbett's reexamination of primary research studies that have
been debated in the IQ literature for years.

"evidence from behavioral-genetics studies has long shown that environment
plays a much smaller role than inheritance in the development of
intelligence."

This is just a flat-wrong statement. The consensus of geneticists is that no
more than half the determination of intelligence is set by genes, and that's
without systematic efforts to vary environmental influences in directed ways.
There are still environmental interventions with huge impact that have rarely
been tried.

I'll stop here in the interest of time for my personal life. I agree with some
of what Ferguson says below the quoted statements, and disagree with some
more.

PARTIAL REFERENCES

Bock, Gregory & Ackrill, Kate (Eds.) (1993). The Origins and Development of
High Ability. (Ciba Foundation Symposium 178). New York: Wiley.

Ceci, Stephen J. (1996). On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on
Intellectual Development Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the
Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

------
pg
The danger here is that you can only talk conclusively about what you can
measure, and imagination, which seems to me the most important component of
genius, is intrinsically hard to measure. If g is in practice dominated by
another quality i that no one can measure, then whatever we say about g is
beside the point.

~~~
dasil003
I think the bigger danger is perpetuating the typical American cultural belief
that people are with smart or stupid. Contrast actual American achievement
with eastern cultures where they consider intelligence to be more of a skill
that can be refined through practice.

The author is rebutting feel-good pop psychology, which I suppose needs to be
done for balance, but you can't argue with the achievement gap, and there are
solid studies showing that praising kids for "working hard" leads to better
achievement than praising them for "being smart."

~~~
pg
Oh, I completely agree. And not just that it's good to act as if effort were
what mattered. I think both imagination and intelligence can be learned.

~~~
aswanson
I agree that some forms of intelligence must be able to be learned, in the
sense that it may involve employing the right algorithm (NlogN rather than
N^N). There must be a software component involved that can be updated and
accelerated through experience. In fact, that seems to be what experience
_is_.

------
callmeed
Reminds me of _Stuff White People Like_

[http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/22/17-gifted-
childre...](http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/22/17-gifted-children/)

"Because an astounding 100% of their kids are gifted! Isn’t that amazing?"

~~~
stcredzero
I remember a day student at the boarding school I went to. He wasn't a genius.
He didn't say much. He had to wake up in the wee hours of the morning to do
farm chores. But dammit, he applied himself, did his work, and pulled down
straight A's without making a whole lot of fuss about it.

100% of the kids aren't gifted. But something like 80% of them in the US could
be performing above the current "average" level with the right encouragement.

------
tokenadult
"Christopher J. Ferguson holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the
University of Central Florida and also trained at the University of Texas
Medical School in Houston. He has been active in publishing research papers on
violent and aggressive behavior in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books
and has done clinical work with adults and juveniles in correctional settings.
Currently he is an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M
International University. His research interests include violent criminal
behavior, positive and negative influences of video games and other violent
media and refinements in meta-analytic techniques."

<http://www.sagepub.com/authorDetails.nav?contribId=628346>

The author of the submitted article doesn't even have high-quality training or
high-quality publications on the issue he is writing about in the submitted
article. The submitted article consists mostly of name-calling, rather than
any reference to newly discovered data or fresh analysis of familiar data. I'd
usually expect better of an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

~~~
mynameishere
_The submitted article consists mostly of name-calling_

About 95 percent of your comment is _ad hominem_.

The article is stating a fairly bland truism, ie, that children vary to some
degree based upon native intelligence. It's hardly worth saying except in the
context of the educational world, whose occupants seem to share a near-
religious professional belief in the unlimited malleability of the human mind.

~~~
ahoyhere
Pointing out that a person lacks credentials is _not_ an ad hominem attack. It
is extremely pertinent.

Think about it...

"Dr. Bob says x about my corpus callosum separation..." "Dr. Bob is a neck
surgeon!" "Stop relying on ad hominem attacks!"

Please, please read a book on rhetoric and logical fallacies.

~~~
mynameishere
Well, here's a book

[http://books.google.com/books?id=-HTQY_b1_84C&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=-HTQY_b1_84C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s)

Search for ad verecundiam for a discussion on the matter. Really, what he's
doing is an opposite of argument from authority, and I think the author
suggests that is 1) Sometimes appropriate, and 2) Sometimes _ad hominem_.

In my eyes, the PhD-holding article-writer is sufficiently credentialed to
write mild articles on mild subjects. To say he's wrong because he didn't go
to a sufficiently good school is a rather obvious personal attack.

For what it's worth, I initially typed in "your comment is 95 percent _name-
calling_ " to parrot him, but then changed it. I mean, it was just so
laughable that he went on and on about the guy's fricking school. and then
made the insane charge that the author was mostly name-calling. Geez.

------
rjurney
How dare you! I am a beautiful butterfly! I am a late bloomer! My genius is in
areas not measured by IQ tests!

It will be here any day. Any day now.

~~~
rjurney
My worst comments get upmoded. My best comments get downmoded :(

~~~
berntb
See it as an example of the advice to writers: "kill your darlings". :-)

And yes, my best jokes are often downmoded too.

And no, I didn't downmod your bad joke -- out of courtesy. :-)

(Previous was one of my good jokes; I've never downmoded.)

~~~
rjurney
haha, thanks :)

Oh well, sometimes you take a shot and miss.

------
BerislavLopac
<em>The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or
cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example,
musical represents an affinity for music...)</em>

This is total nonsense. The author has apparently never watched the early
episodes of any reality TV show of the "looking for a star" variety -- there
are plenty of examples where the interest is enormous, but affinity is
nonexistent. Nor has he ever met someone with great talent for music but who
couldn't bother learning the basics (and this comes from personal experience).

------
beefman
Probably the most poorly-written article I've read this week. But it's
basically correct. Learning ability in individuals is highly correlated across
different skills, and is very stable over the individual's life. It's also
correlated to reaction times in tests of basic reflexes. And the dynamic range
of the correlated bits (g) across the population is not small. I've yet to
encounter a serious denial of these points.

Taken separately, nature and nurture are necessary but not sufficient
conditions on achievement. They're also both heritable. And we know that g is
heritable. It seems likely that between nature and nurture, the former is more
important, but I'm not aware of any compelling evidence for this.

------
viergroupie
>The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive
skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical
represents an affinity for music; naturalistic, an affinity for biology or
geology) or personality traits (interpersonal or intrapersonal skills, which
correspond best to the related concept of emotional intelligence).

Hidden in the article is a sneaky mismatch of definitions. Isn't it a
tautology to argue that intelligence is singular by using a narrower meaning?

------
ahoyhere
Does this sound _bitter_ to anyone? One of the other commentors is right - it
doesn't cite any proof for its argument, much less anything that detracts from
the opposition.

And who doesn't know people who don't seem traditionally intelligent in the
academic things that, as the author suggest, give "success" -- but who are
extraordinarily graceful, skilled athletes, great with their hands, can fix
anything, or always know the perfect gift and the way to make anyone smile and
feel good?

Those people are a good case for "multiple intelligences" and granting them
that acknowledgement isn't just High IQ Guilt. Not paying attention to those
different, seemingly natural abilities is to be blind.

It just seems that certain academics are extremely uncomfortable because it's
not as easily measured. (Why is IQ measurable? Why, because there's a test for
it!)

