Schools and Intelligence

Don’t let the limited idea of intelligence that permeates some schools define your child’s intelligence:

One of the deep problems in education, which should concern you as a parent, is the limited idea of intelligence that permeates school culture. Achievement in education is still largely based on a narrow conception of academic ability and the tendency to confuse that with intelligence in general. Academic ability involves particular sorts of verbal and mathematical reasoning, which is one reason why children in school spend so much time sitting down writing and calculating. Academic ability is important, but it’s not the whole of intelligence. If it were, human culture would be far less interesting. – Ken Robinson, You, Your Child, and School, p. 61