EDUCATION SPECIAL ..................The IQ argument

The IQ argument





To be educated you require a certain degree of intelligence but the fact that you are highly educated does not ensure that you are intelligent. There is a clear difference between the two

Though intelligence and education are used as interchangeable terms and most people think they go hand-in-hand, that's not strictly true. It is correct that to be educated you require a certain degree of intelligence but the fact that you are highly educated or have several college degrees does not ensure that you are intelligent.

Mothers often show off that their children are intelligent because they have achieved a double promotion or received prizes for education and stood first in class. Even then such educational laurels received are no guarantee of intelligence.

In my early days of practice, a group of doctors, including me, started an x-ray and pathology laboratory. Some other people, who were not doctors, were also part of this venture. One of them in particular had no formal education and had not completed high school. Nevertheless, he was extremely intelligent and had amazing organisational skills. So much so that he often put us educated doctors to shame with his proposals and efficient ways of running the clinic. He went on to become a good friend of mine and I learnt a lot from his evaluation of many life problems and the remedy for them.Obviously here education had nothing to do with his intelligence. His business skills were so fine that he has grown to become a very wealthy man.

Albert Einstein, a Nobel Prize winner, was not a brilliant student and dropped out of school at some point of time. His profound statement was “the only thing that interferes with my learning is my education“. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was a college dropout.

A research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology tells us that 85 per cent of your financial success is due to human engineering skills and only 15 per cent is due to your technical knowledge (equated as education).

It is possible to actually measure intelli gence. The Binet and Simon Intelligence Scale was actually a scale to measure mental age at a given chronological age. The mental age divided by the chronological quotient is called mental quotient and is used to evaluate a child's learning potential. Frederick Terman of Stanford University revised the Binet Scale calling it the Stanford Binet Scale and with it developed the concept of Intelligence Quotient, still used today; derived by dividing mental age by chronological age and multiplying the result by 100. Scores below 70 are regarded as mentally deficient between 90 and 110 as normal and above 130 as superior.

A novel way to measure intelligence was developed by Wechsler called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale which uses a combination of verbal scales and performance skills. The gifted on the IQ scale fall into the upper 2 to 3 per cent and gifted people have creativity, leadership good in performing arts and athletics.

Not too many of the people I talk to make a clear difference between intelligence and education. When I ask my wife this she says I am educated but must not be particularly intelligent since she married me. I hope that is a joke.

MM16JUN15