Why are we talking so much about intelligence?
Google is making us stupid (N. Carr, Atlantic Monthly).
Videogames and television make us more clever, as we have alwayes thought the opposite.
(S. Johnson – Everything is bad is good for you).
Shayer believes that boys today are less inclined to develop the ‘differential play patterns’ that previously accounted for their advantage over girls. In short, they have grown less prepared to explore further afield, to go beyond the comfort zone of their controlled environments. ‘Presumably,’ says Shayer, ‘because they were looking at bloody computer games.’. (A. Anthony, Are we too clever for our own good?)
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes new thing possible: put in another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occuring. If enough of those impossibile things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution. (C. Shirky, Here comes everybody)
My concern is that, if we are on a vector toward the radical collectivization of knowledge in this way, the products of the best individual minds of the past will become less and less valued by anybody. (L. Sanger, The Internet and the future of Civilization, in risposta alla domanda) “does Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, mean the end of the Great Books or of liberal education? And is anybody really saying that it does mean that?
I would say that civilization, if it is threatened, is rather more threatened by television (which has robbed an entire generation of the capacity to think critically.(S. Downes, Our Abilities, and the Future of Civilization)
Deliberately I crossed two different topics, about how intelligence is measurable with ICT, as the discussion on the way technology can modify our way of thinking is strictly connected to how we can measure it.
My personal perception is that the theme of intelligence is specially debated in these days, and that lead me to some thoughts, on old and new discrimination forms.
Measures are to define scores:the women brains are littler than the males ones – the males have more grey materia – the gay brain is more similare to the womens ones (is really! not a joke The Gay Brain? Neuroscientists find evidence that homosexuality is hard-wired”
Important psychologist even tryied to find a correlation between brain and other part of the male body (“It’s a trade off, more brains or more penis. You can’t have everything”).
They used intelligence test to demonstrate as groups of persons could be superior to others: in the 60 years some american psychologist stated that afroamerican children who lives in the North of the US, suffered of linguistic deprivation, in other terms their language cannot cope with the communication challenge.
William Lavob in a 1972 study demonstrated that children in a different context have unexpected linguistic skill. The euro american children perceived the test as an opportunity to exhibit their competence, while for the afroamerican children the test is a social and personal threaten and they denied to answer.
The syllogism (every man is a mortal, socrates is a man, socrates is a mortal) for the West culture is the rationale thinking fundamental; althought antropological study demonstrated that syllogism is neither universal not rationality synonimous. It is the west education to makes peoples used to accpet analiytical tasks aken out of context.
The historical roots of the tests dip into colonial period, the West culture measured with own metrics the colonialized people and they demonstrate in such a way their inferiority, so they could justify the adoption of their models and economic exploitation.
Nevertheless, a child supposed “hyperactive” could be evaluted by psychological tests, that not seems to be the best way to evaluate these kind of children and could be defined with an intelligence “under the average”, with further complication on his self confidence level. No one seems to take into account, that the children conscious about to be not up to expectations, decide no to answer to the test?
For the next school year, I wish to all the children and their families to find welcoming schools and attentive teachers, able to catch in every individual his/her singularity and to improve them.
