It is demonstrable that SAT type tests measure nothing but the ability to perform on SAT type tests.
. . . . . . .
I think I have a fair idea of what genuine intelligence is.
Here is an example.
When I was a child we had a family cat named Frosty. Like many of her brother and sister felines, Frosty was fond of jumping on tables, running around constantly and generally making her presence relentlessly felt.
One day my mother, having had enough, decided to temporarily lock the cat away in one of our bedrooms. For some reason, I stayed in the room and watched her.
I was about 12 I think and always up for this sort of amateur science
Frosty spent the next hour or so, probing the door’s weaknesses, looking intently at the space between the floor and the bottom of the door and doing other things – all obviously focused on the task of escape – that could not be easily explained away by using the word “instinct”.
Eventually, and, to my 12 year-old eyes, astoundingly, she leapt, held onto the door handle and twisted her body. After a few tries the door opened. She walked calmly downstairs and drank some water from her bowl.
This was only one of many such moments of problem solving. I never saw supposedly dumb animals in the same way ever again.
Being able to score well on SATs, recite passages from popular theoreticians and revered works of literature and use other peoples’ ideas in discussions is nice and useful and we often mistake this for the quality ‘intelligence’. It flatters those of us who are comfortable with the world of books and campuses and coffee fueled discussions to think so.
But all that is only the shadow play, the external effect of the deeper thing. The ancients who looked at bodies of water and imagined, perhaps inspired by some natural phenomena, a boat for crossing were quite intelligent. The modern historian who writes the story of boats is clever too, but perhaps not as bright as the originators and innovators.
To apply your cleverness to real problems, to bend your mind to understanding the subtlety of nature, to try to see clearly and whole the structure of your world, this is the indication of high intelligence.
There is absolutely nothing going on at the Ivys, from my close observation, that enhances, above non-Ivy institutions, this too often latent quality of the human mind.
DRM
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