Up until this point, I haven't defined what I mean by the word smart. First, I will define intelligence: it is both the ability and capability to learn, comprehend, retain and process information via cognitive function. Note that there is a subtle but important difference between ability and capability. Ability relates to a current skill. Capability has an emphasis on potential and is future-oriented; a young person, for example, can still be considered intelligent even if his adult counterpart currently holds more wisdom and knowledge. This is analogous to how a young sports professional in his rookie year compares his veteran counterpart. We tend to associate the word 'smart' with current intellectual ability rather than capability; with current knowledge rather than potential. I suspect this is because while ability is quantifiable, capability can be very difficult to measure. IQ tests are designed to measure intellectual ability and not capability, which is why they require age adjustments. Even in this capacity IQ tests remain imperfect as they are good at measuring some types of brain functions and not very good at measuring others. Just because a toddler can't solve a complex differential equation now, it doesn't mean he or she can't in the future.
Some people use the analogy of the brain being like a muscle. The brain is of course physiologically very distinct from a muscle, but the key similarity is that both can adapt and grow to meet the demands of external stimuli. This is why the sports professional does weight training: to optimize muscle tone, strength and response. When the analogous response happens in the brain, cognitive psychologists call the process learning.
It's quite astonishing how often people can lose sight of the fact that humans have the prodigious capability to learn. I had a grade three teacher who told my mom on parent's night that she could tell I was "not very smart." She was categorically right; and because she was right, she had a job as an educator to facilitate learning and help make myself and my peers smarter. Recently, The Lens (CBC) aired a documentary on the Arrowsmith School called "Fixing My Brain". The school's curriculum is designed to help students overcome learning disabilities by focusing on cerebral learning and pattern recognition exercises rather than traditional academic fact-based learning. Skeptics of the Arrowsmith program voiced their opinion of the program in this documentary as being unpractical with few demonstrable results. The the efficiencies of the program's methods undoubtedly need to be subjected to scrutiny. At the same time, traditional north American schools can also be criticized in the way they deal with learning disabilities. Currently, students diagnosed with a learning disability are given very lenient time-frames to complete assignments, tests and exams. This is conceptually unpractical at best and excessively magnanimous at worst. On the other hand, the objective of the Arrowsmith program is to resolve the student disability rather than providing the students with a crutch for the rest of their lives (whether it meets this objective or not is not for me to say). In either case, constructive criticism of the existing methods is both necessary and productive, but to question the ability of the children to learn and improve their intellectual ability is fundamentally wrong.
People with learning disabilities (LD) are sometimes misunderstood for people low intellectual capability, yet the two are considered mutually exclusive. Instead they are people who have trouble accessing the traditional learning pathways. Dyslexia (trouble reading and writing), dyspraxia (neural motor skill dysfunction) and ADHD (a nonstandard LD that interferes with learning nonetheless) are some examples of neurological disabilities and disorders, which are considered by neurologists to be independent of intelligence. As I said in my last post, television and video games can increase the probability of a child developing severe learning disabilities, and this increased risk is proportional to the amount of the child spends doing these activities.
It is also important not to become unduly fixated on the idea of learning disabilities or to use them as an exonerating excuse for everything. Many conditions can lead to a medical diagnosis of multiple cognitive incapacities. Improper nutrition, insufficient sleep, psychological depression, drugs and alcohol, emotional stress among many other things can lead to creating an atmosphere where learning is effectively disabled. In poor neighbourhoods, where children go to school hungry, virtually every child effectively has a learning disability although they are rarely diagnosed. Parents and educators alike need to shine the spotlight on how to harness capability rather than find reasons to excuse disability.
In part 4, I will talk about the world of intelletual possibilities that can be opened if we are able to optimize our intellectual capability to learn.
"Fixing my Brain" will be re-aired on Tuesday December 30 at 10pm EST on CBC Newsworld.
Video Promo: "Fixing My Brain" [1:02 min]
The Arrowsmith School will also be looked at in another CBC documentary called "The Brain That Changes Itself", which will air at 8pm on Thursday November 27.
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