OpinionJournal – Extra
OpinionJournal – Extra:
The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized–it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law.
snip
Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.
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Ok, while I buy that not everyone should pursue higher education… This bit above.. it is just fabrication, a fiction, and an ideological one. There is no proof that this has ever been the case and there have been recent books showing that elite university and colleges.
Intelligence is not a gift, it is a natural capacity. I’m really not even sure it exists beyond a statistical inference. I know that some people seem to lack certain mental capacities that others seem to have, and that some people can master some skills of thought easily, but not everyone can master all skills of thought simply. I start from the idea, in my thinking, that the brain is a remarkable organ that is capable of all kinds of adaptations and transferrences in order to do something, but sometimes… it just can’t do something, but learning that it can’t do something is fascinating. Almost everyone that enters the educational system can learn from experience and can learn to be creative and inventive in interesting ways. They key is to take that and find a way to get them to be able to do that in our world. There is no single solution…. like ‘liberal arts’ that will work for this.
