Opinion & Commentary
With A High IQ Comes Need For Special Education
When it comes to education of the intellectually gifted, Australia and the United States share a common dread of admitting the obvious. The intellectually gifted exist, and they end up running the country whether or not we recognize them for what they are.
By “intellectually gifted” I do not mean the rarefied few who can become theoretical physicists. I am referring to the much broader set of people who are intellectually capable of standing out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics. Research about IQ and job performance indicates that this definition embraces roughly the top 10 percent of the population, or about a million people out of Australia’s labor force—a lot of people, not a tiny group of IQ nerds.
In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements--medicine, engineering, law, the sciences, and academia--the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have intellectual ability in this range. Evidence about who enters occupations for which the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people in this range also occupy large proportions of jobs in the upper reaches of corporations and government. People in the top 10 percent of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software, and every other form of advanced technology.
Please do not understand me too quickly. I am not saying that everyone with a high IQ achieves these positions, or that character and industriousness—luck too, for that matter—don’t count. I am not saying that one cannot become a corporate executive or journalist with a lesser IQ. Rather, I am saying that those who reach leadership positions are overwhelmingly drawn from the pool of those in the top 10 percent of intellectual ability, thereby putting Australia, the United States, and every other advanced nation in the same bind. The top 10 percent of the intellectual distribution has a huge influence on whether our economies are vital or stagnant, our cultures are healthy or sick, and our institutions are secure or endangered. The furiously resisted but simple truth is that our futures depend crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence.
If amount of education were the only measure, Australia is doing just fine with the gifted. Most Australian children with IQs in the top 10 percent get an opportunity for higher education, and large numbers of them end up attending the most prestigious universities. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized--it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But, for practical purposes, enough of the gifted are getting advanced education.
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The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens. We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. Australians, famous for their egalitarian outlook (your tall-poppies metaphor has become internationally known), are even more sensitive than Americans on this score.
But this very devotion to egalitarianism creates a blind spot in the treatment of the gifted. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully, and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.
The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires, first of all, recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less-talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand does not necessarily mean shipping the gifted off to special schools, but it does require at least some classes of their own. The point is not to coddle them, but to create a setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.
The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.
The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with the classical writings from both West and East. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice; they must know what it means to be good.
The encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been truer.
All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of tribal cultures and classical Greece; they should be learning the best in the arts and sciences that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of tribal folkways and a heavy dose of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.
In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, face reality. Plato wanted to choose an elite. We in America and Australia alike are stuck with one. Our economies and cultures are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. It is a reality embedded in the nature of modernity. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.
Dr Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is in Australia as a guest of The Centre for Independent Studies and will speak at the centre’s Big Ideas Forum in Sydney on August 13.
