School Defined Smart Too Narrowly, and Brilliant People Believed It

Ken Robinson, the English educator and author, was explaining why modern schooling feels so narrow when he traced it to an old idea about the mind. Public education, he argued, was not only built to meet the economic needs of its time. It was built around a particular definition of what it means to be smart.

When public schooling began in the 1800s, he said, people who objected claimed that street kids and working class children could never master reading and writing, and were not worth the effort.

Then he said it: "Many brilliant people think they're not because they've been judged against this particular view of the mind."

By that view, Robinson said, real intelligence meant "capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning" and knowledge of the classics. Deductive reasoning means working from general rules to a specific answer, as in a math proof, and the classics means the ancient Greek and Latin literature long treated as the core of an educated person.

That is what came to be called academic ability, and the idea was built into public schooling. Robinson called it "deep in the gene pool of public education."

That definition split the world in two, he argued. There were academic people and nonacademic people, smart people and nonsmart people. If you fit the academic pattern, you counted as intelligent, and if you did not, you were placed on the other side.

Robinson did not argue the model helped no one; he said it had been great for some, and that "there have been people who benefited wonderfully from it but most people have not." Instead, he said, this model "has caused chaos in many people's lives."

His point, in his words, was that "many brilliant people think they're not" because school judged them against a narrow view, and brilliance that fell outside that view did not count as smart.