Preface
WRITING A BOOK CAN BE an
educational experience, not so much from the research required, but
more significantly from the challenge of marshalling the insights
gained from all the random material gathered into some ordered form. It
is not enough to know everything ever written or thought on a
subject—that is the hallmark of “experts” who try to dazzle you with
their accumulated knowledge. What matters, and adds to a reader’s
understanding, can only come from a synthesis of everything discovered
into meaningful patterns and conclusions.
In the
case of Wasted Genius, the writing process forced me to draw some
overarching conclusions based upon my own experience, the history of
education and the theories put forth by scholars in the field, and from
correlating such knowledge with recent findings in neurology that
reveal how our brains and personalities develop and function. I
discovered that the “theories” of most current scholars on
the
subject are the least instructive, but their diverse opinions do
illustrate the vast number of wrong answers that come from most
experts. (When most experts disagree with each other, shouldn’t we
assume that most of them have to be wrong?)
“Experts” in
soft sciences such as politics, economics, climatology, psychology,
anthropology, and education usually lack the objectivity found among
experts in the hard sciences. The rigors of the scientific
method—observation, measurement, and the requirement of consistency of
results—are not part of the soft-scientists‘ tool kits.
Their
deficiencies stem from trying to emulate the physical scientists, an
effort that requires them to treat human behavior as if it obeyed some
absolute physical laws such as gravity, momentum, evolution, or could
be mapped like the celestial orbits of inanimate planets. That, of
course, is impossible, humans being such independent and ornery
creatures,
so their findings end too often in the speculative, philosophical,
often utopian arena of recurring fads, fancies, and follies that have
so often throughout history held up mankind’s progress. The recent
hundred- year love affair with IQ tests is one such fancy that should
be unmasked.
I have for years had a vague uneasiness with
the undue emphasis placed on tests and school grades. But it still came
as a surprise to discover that such fears are fully justified. There
have been a few vocal and authoritative critics of IQ tests during the
past thirty years, and in
the following pages, their warnings
are summarized. But such criticism of IQ tests is not new. They were
anticipated by J. P. Guilford fifty years ago, when he asserted the
idea of “multiple independent mental abilities.” And more than
seventy-five years ago, L. L. Thurstone tried to warn us about the
complexity of measuring anyone’s full capabilities with a single
yardstick.
Jean Piaget, a pioneer creator of IQ tests,
indicated one hundred years ago that there could be no single test of a
student’s abilities and that the tests were only useful to measure a
teacher’s progress in instructing students. In spite of such warnings,
the entrenched educational
and testing interests have promoted
the tests far beyond their relevance—with dire consequences for both
our children and our country. The voices of reason were drowned out by
the self-aggrandizing ambitions and greed of the teaching and testing
industry. This history illustrates a common feature of soft-science
intellectuals: that
they will drown out all opposition to their
pet theories, not with logic or conclusive facts, but with what Thomas
Sowell describes as their “verbal virtuosity.”
A related
“blind spot” that has been perpetuated by soft scientists comes from
numerous fallacies based on Darwinian evolutionary theories—that
humans are just big apes, ruled by atavistic passions, and incapable of
either controlling themselves or rising above raw instinctual behavior.
This view, with its exaggerated application of the
“survival of
the fittest” mentality, and an excessive regard for ”human nature,”
gave added credence to the notion that intelligence is a fixed at-birth
biological fact. That recently discredited notion has allowed the
academics and intelligentsia to assert that intelligence varies by race
and class, and that some people are “better” than others. It does not
take a genius to see that these insidious concepts have been advanced
by those who want to elevate themselves by denigrating everyone else.
Because
abstract thinkers score higher on IQ and SAT tests, we have gradually
become burdened by a new elite leadership that is long on theory and
short on common sense. What’s worse, their influence has permeated the
“approved” methods used for both parenting and schooling our youth. In
the following pages, we will examine the results, focusing on the
question of whether these new theories have resulted in any gains for
our children compared to the children of our recent ancestors.
Two
important elements of the nature-nurture debate that have been ignored
by most writers on the subject are the importance of a balanced
cognitive capability and the necessity to concede that there is a vast
array of multiple capabilities that need balancing. Mitchell Estaphan
teaches psychology at a nearby community college, and he has an theory
about every human‘s need for “balance.” His ideas are founded on an
understanding of how different people’s brains work. The Left and Right
sides contribute differing amounts of input to different individuals.
The Left mode tends to supply a rational, emotionally controlled, and
logical approach, usually based on observations of the real world and
drawing on accumulated information. The Right side of the brain leans
to intuitive, subjective judgments, with a more open expression of
feelings. The Left is more concrete and “masculine”; the right more
abstract and “feminine.” Since everyone has a mix of these quadrants,
their abilities are founded on a number of different forms of
intelligence, all of which contribute to success, and relegates the
ability to nail IQ tests to being just one of their “multiple
intelligences.”
Mitch’s research supports the belief that
slightly under one-half of students are abstract learners, who can
readily learn from merely reading, while slightly more than half are
applied learners, who learn best by seeing and doing real-life tasks.
Because our schools teach a one-size fits all pedagogy, some students
benefit while others fall behind. And yet all methods of learning are
beneficial. My studies of history show that it has been the concrete
thinkers, far more than the abstract thinkers, who have achieved the
innovations and discoveries that have advanced societies. However, it
is no secret that IQ tests reward the conceptual abilities of abstract
thinkers and penalize the capabilities of practical doers.
Today’s
teaching establishment, which has made a fetish of multiculturalism,
claiming that all cultures are equally praiseworthy, reveals its
hypocrisy by failing to accept and cultivate the diversity of our
students’ learning styles. There are many equally valuable ways of
learning and different personal bases for knowing. We must accept the
idea of multiple intelligences and the need to understand the many
elements that make up an individual’s total mental capability. Estaphan
points out that those individuals with skills across three or four
quadrants gain an advantage from such “whole brained” flexibility and
power that allows them to work with many groups and assume leadership
roles and executive functions. A high IQ by itself offers no evidence
of such capability.
This significant variability in the
way our brains work reveals a few things about the history of human
advances. If classic Darwinian theory applied to humans, the “survival
of the fittest” concept would suggest that those with the greatest
survival and reproductive skills would have passed on their genes to
most of today‘s peoples. In most of the animal kingdoms, the strongest
males control their harems and pass on their aggressive natures and
vigorous bodies. Quite differently, when the earliest humans adopted
monogamy, they established a pattern where a much greater
diversity of genetic types was perpetuated.
Almost all males
succeeded at reproduction, and the resulting multi-faceted gene pool
created a greater probability for innovative and creative genius to
emerge. And when our ancestors discovered fire, built shelters, and
donned fur clothing, they largely escaped the harsh laws of survival of
the fittest. And that was tens of thousands of
years ago!
With
shelter, heat, and monogamy, the human race has been able to sustain a
broad ranger of capabilities, unavailable to all other living things.
The occasional innovative tinkerers that emerged from that large and
varied gene pool were the scientists, engineers and mechanics that
powered civilization’s advances. Unfortunately, for the past fifty
years, our colleges have rejected diversity of mental style and instead
have selected the tiny percentage of students who display the highest
abstract and intuitive thinking revealed by IQ tests. Those are the
people being advanced more and more into leadership positions,
representing a new elite with a fondness for abstract concepts, an out
of touch elite that harbors a contempt for the practical and
traditional ways of thinking, a dangerous group that exposes us all to
the folly of their ideologies, their speculative financial dealings,
and their corrupt politics.
It is worth noting that few
individuals being “produced” today are the equal in wisdom, maturity,
and value to their country as the historic leaders that built and
sustained us: Adams, Franklin, Carnegie, Washington, Lincoln, Reagan,
Abigail Adams, Edison, or Harriet Beecher Stowe. The differences are
not of a genetic or cognitive nature. On average, Americans today have
the same cognitive powers that our ancestors did one hundred and two
hundred years ago. The differences are of an environmental nature, a
difference in attitude, a difference in initiative and self-reliance.
There was some such “X factor” in the earlier Americans’ childhoods
that is missing today. If there are ways to isolate that crucial
influence—and we could thereby help our children grow, while
simultaneously enhancing our winning national character—we would do
well to find that principle and use it.
Any search for the
secret ingredient that made America great must include the cumulative
knowledge we have from the physical sciences of biology and psychology,
as well as from the lessons to be derived from history.
Science tells us three things:
1. Children’s brains are not fully developed until their mid-20s.
2. There is no way to predict which child will accomplish great things.
3. Test scores miss most of the vital traits that make for success.
History tells us three things:
1. Great people make great nations
2. Empowering and ennobling cultures help people attain their full potential.
3.
Parents, families, and schools are the bedrock of culture, and can be
supported or undermined by community organizations, churches, and the
media/entertainment industry.
The related historical truth
that conspicuously applies to America is that our nation was made by
its people—the various enterprising immigrants who settled the land.
They left behind their homelands, their Kings and pompous
aristocracies, and the closed economies that offered little opportunity
to the poor or disadvantaged. They brought
with them their love
of freedom, their many spiritual Faiths, and their fierce independence
and self-reliance. And those people, along with the hordes that
followed, built America.
America did not become great
because of its climate, geography, natural resources, or lady luck.
Most of the European countries along with much of Asia and South
America, North Africa, and the Far East had similar natural advantages.
But the people inhabiting those other equally “blessed” regions never
found a way to do what the Americans did. That failure to keep up was
not because they were inferior in any way, but simply because their
political systems, cultural mores, and autocratic leadership obstructed
individual initiative. The ordinary people in those lands lost out
simply because they never had the freedom or opportunity that was
available in America.
America’s growth in population and
affluence was explosive! Starting in 1620 as a few small outposts, the
new arrivals spread up and down the coast, into the mountains, and
beyond to the Pacific ocean. There was no infrastructure waiting them,
no docks, no bridges, no shelter or farms. With hand tools, they cut
the forests, dug out the rocks and roots, plowed the soil, and grew
their food. Within two hundred years, these first eight generations of
Americans built a democratic nation of unheard of prosperity and power.
Within 150 years of the landing at Plymouth Rock, six
generations of Americans had challenged—and then beaten—the most
powerful nation in the world, claiming and winning liberty from their
mother country. There were dozens of nations from China to Persia to
France, spanning most of the globe, that had been building their
cities, roads, and businesses for more than a thousand years, and yet
not one could match the extraordinary and rapid progress achieved by
those American pioneer generations. A marathon runner would have to
give all his competitors a twenty-mile head start, then sprint to the
finish line before all of them, to match the enormity and rapidity of
America’s achievement, an achievement fueled by our past generations,
generations that were fueled by a different psychology than the one
being taught in today’s schools and colleges.
That
explosion of progress from 1620–1870 occurred with no aristocracy,
virtually no government, no large organizations, no stultifying Faith,
no taxes, and no intellectual class. It is the author’s contention that
it was the absence of those impediments that allowed American
individuals to attain such extraordinary progress. The common people of
most any other society in the rest of the world could have done the
same—if they had been free of such restraining and repressive
influences.
Ralph Waldo Emerson has been called America’s
first intellectual, and his first published book was issued in 1836,
more than two hundred years after the first settlers had arrived. Many
intellectuals followed, and after 250 years of unparalleled progress,
the common people—the concrete thinkers—started to be pushed aside by
those
who pretended to be smarter, more sophisticated, and
better educated. That was the beginning of our national decline. The
momentum and vigor of practical people is still carrying us forward,
but slower and slower, as the obstacles to their efforts multiply. It
is worth asking why members of our “Ruling Class”—with their years and
years of schooling,
advanced primarily because of their high IQ
and SAT test scores, and employing all the advances science has
offered—have somehow managed to reverse three centuries of progress.
But reverse it they have, and one of the objects of this book is to
explain how such an anomaly has occurred.
America is
Broken. There were early signs in the 1960s, when a Harvard professor
received favorable media coverage when he urged students to “light up,
turn off, and drop out.” Later, we saw Presidents John F. Kennedy and
Bill Clinton turn the oval office into a Hugh Hefner playhouse. Just
recently, the breakage became significant, unprecedented, and
unmistakable; the financial collapse of 2009 revealed the corrupt
conspiracy between Congress, the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve
officials, Fannie Mae, and the most speculative trading divisions of
our largest and once respected financial banks and insurance companies.
Corruption is not new. Politicians have always wasted or
“redirected” billions of dollars to cronies and special interest
groups; that is what government officials do. In the past, we were not
crippled by a billion dollars of fraud here and a billion there.
However, today’s leadership elites have escalated the cost of their
greed and incompetence. We are talking in the trillions of dollars, and
our ballooning national debt threatens the future of America.
This
book is not political, but it does call for fiscal prudence— which
might be called a form of “conservative” financial management. But the
alternative—liberal spending in excess of one’s income—is a violation
of every sound financial planning rule and should not even be
considered a debatable political issue. There are many social issues
where one can debate liberal-conservative positions, but in financial
matters the need to minimize debt, eliminate deficits, maintain a
strong currency and banking system, and establish transparency and
honesty, are simple time-tested principles.
While deficits
will eventually bankrupt the country, they have an added perverse
effect: The growing acceptance that deficits can be tolerated is
bankrupting the fiscal common sense of the American people. We are told
that the deficit and national debt are not problems. We are told that
each of us should also use credit to live the good life. Our
governments at all levels sell us lottery tickets so we can hope to hit
it big without the pain of saving or thrift. And yet we know that our
children must be taught to save, to defer gratification of some
impulses and desires, and to possess the character to be honorable in
their personal and financial dealings. Those values are three of the
most important things they need to learn.
But look at the
bad examples rampant around us! The politician-demagogues deliberately
create deficits to pay for the promises they made to keep getting
elected. They lie. They steal. They cheat, and some demean the office
they sit in. In this book we will examine how we got to be burdened by
this new elite class in Washington and Wall Street that is destroying
our country. We will reveal the impact they have on us, the citizens,
on our children, and on American character. If we don’t throw the
rascals out, these demagogues will surely bring on the decline of
America and the end of our power and prosperity. Then what will happen
to this sweet land of liberty?
Because the “best and
brightest” as measured today by our left-leaning academics have few
practical skills—and are predisposed against concrete thinking—their
primary employment opportunities are in government-planning roles,
complex financial manipulations, and in the proliferating special
advocacy organizations and foundations that seek to change America. As
a group, they have become parasites feeding on the productive fruits of
the working people. Until we get our schools to nurture the practical
abilities of “average” students and encourage the high IQ types to
enter the hard-physical sciences, we are doomed to keep producing a
harmful crop of unreasoning graduates hell-bent on assuming power-based
positions in government and think-tanks. And all because we have been
hoodwinked into an incorrect understanding of who’s smart and who
isn’t!
We must look beyond both IQ and EQ to a new concept of
TCQ—a
person’s total competency quotient. All kids can be inculcated with the
values and attitudes that make for successful lives. The average ones
are frequently the most valuable to the nation, and the “brightest,”
except for their efforts in the physical sciences, should not get
preferential treatment. We must recognize the great variety of
attributes that make up a person’s “intelligence.” Only then can we
gain an understanding of whether such qualities as integrity, rational
decision-making, and initiative, are inborn or learned—and how these
components affect the destiny of children and the country.
In
short, we will examine just what “intelligence” represents, what makes
a person an intellectual, and just what makes an individual and a
nation successful. The good news is that parents and schools can once
again raise the kinds of people that made America great. We will show
that it has been our false notion of intelligence and expertise that
has caused our growing national dysfunction. And curiously, it all gets
back to the problems caused by overemphasis on IQ and SAT scores,
school grades, and current theories on schooling and parenting. We will
show how practical thinking trumps abstract thinking and how our
nation’s future is dependent not on the most intelligent but on the
most balanced, the most pragmatic, and those
with the highest integrity.