Opinion | We Overvalue Intelligence

Freeman pointed out that it is easy to squelch this fire by stuffing children to the gills with school-type learning. It’s easy to ruin a life by treating a person, no matter how gifted, as a brain on a stick. “After all these years,” she wrote, “I am certain that to take just one aspect of a child’s life, giftedness, as a basis for making decisions which will affect them for the rest of their lives is to risk their emotional balance, and even their success in life.”

The bottom line is that we need to put intelligence in its place. We need to value it and put precocious children in settings where they are nurtured and stretched. But we don’t want to overvalue it. In my view, it’s crazy that many top universities look for students who scored over 1300 or 1400 on their SATs and reject most applicants below that. That’s placing too high a value on a narrow aspect of ability.

When you look at who really achieves great things, you notice that most of them were not prodigies. They didn’t wow people at age 18, but over the course of their adulthood they found some deep interest in something, and they achieved mastery. Many of society’s great contributors didn’t have an easily identifiable extraordinary ability; they had the right mixture of slight advantages and character traits that came together in the right way.

A recurring notion in Freeman’s book is “If I had stopped at ….” If she had stopped interviewing one person at 20, she wouldn’t have seen how a glittering childhood led to a sad adulthood. If she had stopped at 40, she wouldn’t have seen how a formerly lost person found his way. Lives are astonishingly nonlinear. In his book “Child Prodigies and Exceptional Early Achievers,” John Radford argued that it is nearly impossible to predict adult mastery from giftedness in childhood.

Yes, a child born extremely intelligent is lucky and likely to do well, but as Lubinski and Benbow mentioned in their conversation with me, we want to see each person whole. I’d put it this way: It’s nice to know who is good at taking intelligence tests, but it’s more important to know who is lit by an inner fire.

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