High Cognitive Minds

Sometimes I wonder if the lack of real information about high levels of intelligence is just as much about fear as it is about insufficient data. It’s a thought that occurs to me fairly often, and it was triggered once again by High IQ Kids, the latest addition to my long shelf of books about giftedness and creativity. Titles don’t always tell you exactly what a book is about, but they do usually offer a clue, especially in a crowded field like gifted children. But “High IQ Kids” could mean anything from about 125 IQ, on up. It’s only when you turn the book over that you see the truth, halfway down the back cover. After a typically generic intro, the subject is finally revealed: “Raising or educating highly, exceptionally, or profoundly gifted kids can be daunting.” It’s almost as if the extremes of giftedness have to be backed into slowly, so as not to offend anyone.

As if to reinforce this feeling, I got into a conversation with a grad student who’s thought a lot about the state of gifted education and wonders if there is any useful role for him. One of his advisors told him that writing anything in support of gifted education, whether in his dissertation or a published paper, would harm his future career. One example doesn’t necessarily mean that the attitude is wide-spread, but the way in which the academic literature determinedly steers around long-standing problems, and avoids even the suggestion of anything truly innovative makes it a reasonable possibility.

I keep coming back to certain patterns: the emphasis in education, counseling, and research, on the emotional well-being of the gifted. The strict adherence to statistical research and standards. The statements by so many experts of various sorts, that we don’t know enough about the gifted, don’t really know how to identify them, how to teach them, how to guide them—a mantra of failure. The information is there. The question is why nobody looks at it. One reason is that educational psychology is based on quantification—statistics—not on biology.

But there is also tremendous prejudice against the idea of intellectual superiority. Schools acknowledge it when they can’t avoid it, but in the most roundabout possible ways, ways that allow them to escape any necessity for action. Superiority automatically implies its opposite; if a person is superior in any way, then everybody else must be inferior. Most people can tolerate the idea that they’re athletically or musically inferior, but not that they’re intellectually inferior.

Any professional who suggested that such a state of comparative inferiority of intellect exists would risk his credibility and his career. Anyone who offers to provide evidence of a biological basis for such differences will be verbally crucified, accused of bigotry, and even physically attacked. This has happened over and over again. The vitriolic and active resentment of anybody who feels themselves wronged and whose self-image depends on their sense of superiority or at least on some idea of fitting the norm, is the basis for the fear which keeps the very idea of differences in intellectual capacity in the shadows. “IQ” and “giftedness” are euphemisms for something that can’t be openly acknowledged or discussed, and certainly isn’t a proper subject for research.