In an interview, Bruce Springsteen said:
I wasn’t quite suited for the educational system. One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive — very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure [get lost].
Yes! That’s what I’m saying here, here, and here. The quote is from David Shenk’s great new blog about talent and how to nurture it.
I would *not* say that, just because some students are very poorly served by the educational system (and I do think it sucks badly, overall), that there are different types of intelligence. Do you believe in the 7-odd type of intelligence theory? (I forget whose.) I think there could be two or three main different areas of intelligence, with several more different minor abilities (like perfect pitch) that don’t have much to do with a good, general education. The diversity in ability even among top students is more easily explained by narrow learning disabilities (like ADHD or Asperger’s) and differential skill development. Which isn’t to say that it’s just as important to recognize these differences. But obscuring their nature isn’t helpful.
Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg have both proposed theories of multiple intelligences — about seven of them, yes. They are certainly improvements over the single-intelligence idea but no I don’t take them seriously. The IQ test was developed to predict school performance. You would need a different test to predict performance of anything else. People make their living in thousands of different ways. Each way requires different abilities. For each way you could make a separate test. Usually those specialized abilities (needed for one particular job but not other jobs) improve with practice so as a person becomes more skilled in a narrow area it becomes harder and harder to predict his or her performance based on a measure of any one or seven general intelligences.
Yes, exactly right, and well said!
This doesn’t mean that IQ and g is irrelevant, though.
The point of an IQ test is that it is highly correlated with g, which is highly correlated with all of these various abilities you cite. So an IQ test is a good “rough handle” on someone’s ability level, but does not predict whether they will have a very high ability level on some particular given set of abilities.
IQ tests have various subtests, and one of the main differences is between verbal and performance subtests. E.g., some people have better verbal than math scores. Sometimes people have specific minor flaws, and do much worse on some subtests than on the rest of the test, bringing down their overall score (as noted by pdf23ds above). So someone with high verbal and lower performance will have the same overall IQ as someone with lower verbal and high performance. The higher verbal person would do better in a profession where verbal skills are more important, and the higher performance person would do better in a profession where logic/math are more important, both with the same raw IQ score.
This doesn’t mean that IQ is meaningless — it can be useful in a variety of ways, but it certainly does not define the limits of what a given individual can do, or the fields in which they might excel.
Some examples of where IQ is useful:
The military uses IQ as a screening device, to limit the percentage of enlistees who have low IQs, and this has proven very successful for them. They may reject some candidates who would be successful, but they also eliminate a large number who would not work. So as a filter it is good.
Programs for gifted children often use IQ tests as screening filters, and they may also reject some kids who would be well served by the program, but the kids they accept are definitely well-served and the material taught is appropriate for their ability level.
I would like to see us go back to using IQ tests to normalize school results. If the kids in a school have an average IQ of 85, it is simply not reasonable to expect them to have the same achievement scores on the same tests as kids in a school with an average IQ of 115 (unless you lower the achievement level required down to the point that an IQ of 70 is all that is required to be able to learn the material, in which case almost all the kids at both schools will get perfect scores — there is a more detailed analysis of the effect of test difficulty on “performance improvements” at https://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/gap.htm)
IQ does predict plenty beyond school performance, though. (See also here.) It isn’t obvious that a test designed to measure such a narrow ability would turn out to be so useful and cross-correlated with other abilities, but it appears that it *is* the case.
Time, I don’t know that it’s clear that *early* education (as in the first few years of school) can’t affect a child’s ultimate IQ scores, so I’m not sure that such normalization would be desirable until middle school or beyond, if at all.