Bless you my child. I too am engaged at FR because my mind craves the intellectual rigor of learning from and struggling with others who are intellectually driven.
Posted on 06/11/2011 4:54:29 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Our expensive educational system does not teach intelligence. Most publicly educated people in the US do not know what intelligence is. A majority believe it is innate, something people are born with. In fact, intelligence is a product of classical education.
One must be taught to think. Logical or critical thinking may be learned easily or with difficulty but it is a learned skill. Mathematics and classical philosophy teach thinking skills. Thinking is the antithesis of indoctrination. Teaching people how to think is categorically the opposite of teaching them what to think.
Obama has not learned how to think, only what to think. This is what makes him doctrinaire and ideological, he has mastered a limited set of ideas and principles that he applies universally in all circumstances. He has the same set of responses to every condition. He is unable to differentiate between a variety of situations and evaluate them individually. His is a one size fits all mind.
Obama's dogged insistence on applying one set of principles to every situation is viewed by a preponderance of people as intellectual rigor. For those who do not have a clue about the true nature of intelligence this makes perfect sense. It is not about thinking. It is about learning the correct response and applying it with all diligence and discipline. That is the fundamental discipline of socialism.
At its core socialism is a one size fits all political discipline. The answers have all been worked out. Learning them and applying them rigidly is the work of the true believer. Obama is, by any measure, a true believer, not an intellectual.
I am in near complete disagreement with you. I do not confuse intelligence and wisdom. Intellect is not something anyone is born with. It is a learned discipline. Wisdom comes through many years and substantial effort involving the application of intellectual discipline.
There is substantial recognition that IQ tests are based on socialization skills. Knowledge of cultural icons increase IQ tests. The notion of innate intelligence is difficult if not impossible to test.
He’s not stupid...he’s intentional.
You’re absolutely right, and it is amazing how thoroughly that experience has been scrubbed from our compulsory ‘education’. It is not accidental.
Louis,
I couldn’t get past the first four sentences. Intelligence is innate.
Bless you my child. I too am engaged at FR because my mind craves the intellectual rigor of learning from and struggling with others who are intellectually driven.
WOW!
Well worth re reading. Thank you for the brilliant post.
Intelligence can be learned. It is, after all, a discipline. I have witnessed people with ostensibly low intellectual ability learn to think critically while others simply repeat what they have learned by rote.
The discussion about memory is to the point. Learning to regurgitate some ritualistic statement is no sign of intellegence. It may be a sign of a good memory, what ever that is. It does not, however, involve critical thinking. I am sure as a teacher you tried to teach your children to think, not simply regurgitate.
I am not against rote learning. I still know my times tables. Learning them gave me the foundation to learn how to develop higher mathematical skills, although I am by no means a mathematician.
Show me your clear evidence that Quantum Mechanics is a proven science which exists outside of Theorist mathematics if you will.
I belong to the realistic realm of science and base my career on my own learning, not some one else’s baseless theory of Psychometrics.
Just a word about this ‘remembering/reciting’ point...
Don’t you guys think that before he was going to recite this Muslim thing in public, he rehearsed it?? I mean, this is barack obama.. Mr. Ummm, err, uhhh... His handlers wouldn’t let him go out and recite anything cold.
—That means Islam is still has a strong influence over Obama.
— We should remember that every child in our government K-12 schools are being indoctrinated in godless secular humanism. They must think and reason godless merely to cooperate within the classroom.
Whatever it is we understand intelligence to be its application is certainly not innate. Using one’s God given intelligence is a process of disciplined thinking. Without that discipline it does not matter what one is born with. Try reading the entire article and get back to me.
Obama is actually as stupid as liberals believe conservatives, especially anyone named Reagan, Bush or Palin to be.
I did not use the word “fact”. In fact I was clear about the importance of learning the thinking that leads to the postulate of quantum mechanics. Like it or not we are not in disagreement.
Amen and amen.
Well done Louis. Well done.
The difference is unnoticed to most, subtle to many, acutely obvious to few.
If you truly believe this, then you are seriously misguided.
A clear illustration of how wrong you are lies in the historical account of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Nobody trained him, taught him or molded him. He simply began listening to other musicians play and he learned it on his own amazing account.
He could write entire symphonies out of thin air, without outer influence and he only wrote them once, without the required proofreading or editing. He could also hear an entire musical piece only once, and then duplicate it perfectly and in it's entirety, find flaws in it and correct it while he was playing it.
His genius was entirely spontaneous as was Einstein.
“But IQ tests don’t measure how successfully one’s been indoctrinated, do they?”
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No, they don’t, IQ measures the ability to understand certain concepts and to retain, recall and use information. IQ alone though is no guarantee of anything. There are a lot of examples of “high IQ idiots”.
“He cited a March poll by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project in which two-thirds of blacks and Hispanics said they expected to be better off economically in 10 years. So did 55 percent of college-educated whites. But only 44 percent of non-college whites agreed.”
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Possibly all are correct in their expectations! The current system includes preferences designed to put whites at the end of the line and whites without degrees are behind whites with degrees. On the other hand it may be that the whites without degrees are the only ones making a correct assessment of the future. We all may be worse off in ten years.
{I did not use the word “fact”.}
You did not use it, but you implied it. You expressed it as if it were final. And by the way, keep emotional implications out of this discussion. I could care less if you think I “Like it or not”.
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