The Classification of Intelligence

And the Pathway to Following Unikearning

Even before children began their worklife as students, intelligence classification begins.  Of course others do argue against the classification, that it will be affected by economic status, sex, and to a large degree race.

But what is seldom considered is the notion that everyone is supposed to know the same thing at the same age, as if the magic determinant of every personality has only a determinant that has to be comparable and must be accomplished at a certain age, or the child is deficient.  The child must learn to crawl within certain age parameters, then walk, etc.  All girls must want to play with dolls, a  boy is effeminate to do so.  A boy needs to play with toy airplanes.  To some degree this has changed, but a woman today who might be seeking a companion on social media still seems to have a need to say she likes sports or outdoor activities, or to distinguish that she is not only interested in “girly" activities.  Men who prefer to be “housemoms”, though much more common than in the past, are still considered, to a large extent, economically deficient, unless they have some type of profession, say a writer, where he is supposed to be at home.  One modern solution is “shared parenting” but then that requires a lot of division of responsibilities.   Or a lackadaisical approach to do whatever is needed when it is needed, but then there could be recriminations that arise if one feels one is “doing more than his share”.

What is missed in all of this, is the diversity of personality, and the immediate attempt to classify children by their age and their sex. Male personalities are all Mars and females are all Venus, with possibilities perhaps left over for some degrees of variation.  Men are “macho’, women are “nurturing”.  Men don’t show emotions as easily (but I guess violent emotions in men are not expressing them because men are, of course, macho).  Of course, many say this is the way we are taught, and of course that is true, but what we are attempting to get at is not the teaching of behaviors that males should be one way or the other, etc., but the attempt to confirm the diverse genetic needs of humans—our inherited genetic need for personality diversity that allowed us to successfully evolve by recognizing and nurturing children to develop their personalities individually and allowing them to develop at the stages of their interest. (Some will say times are different and I am dating myself–I doubt the truth in that, I think there is more argument that there should be a change, and there are greater arguments that what I wrote is “negatively good, or wrong, but the others say that  if the stereotypes are not maintained then that is the wrong, and the there is plenty of both anecdotal and statistical that those who attempt to defer the stereotypes still face accusations at the slightest deviation in their behavior that might indicate “macho” or “girly” behavior, so I would tend to believe it is a very active debate and remains a very conscious divide even if those who may profess they disbelieve in the stereotypes.  Ultimately however, I imagine the extremes were always rarer than the norm, and the ideology has had and still has more effect than most wish to pay lip service to.)

To assume there is only one age in which a personality can acquire a skill or a knowledge not only flies in the face of evidence (any type of “prodigy”); it limits the prodigy from pursuing other skills or interests, it prevents those more prodigious at an earlier age from ever developing a future interest or skill.  I learned to read earlier than most, but I had a great difficulty in learning to write. I guess I never actually did learn what is called “script”, and if someone writes to me in script I have to find someone to read it to me.  But even printing was difficult and I never became proficient.  My mother taught me to use the typewriter in 2nd grade and I became quite talented.  But for writing I just developed my own eccentric method of formulating letters and generally people have a difficulty comprehending much of what I write by hand.  But I developed my writing from a self designed shorthand as a tool for aiding my memory and to be able to “take notes” as fast as a speaker could talk.  And I was writing these notes before any educational program to  teach me how to make formal letters so what I was being taught never conformed to the experience I had already developed, so I suppose there was this self-rejection of what I was being taught.  The hammering upon my abilities and the castigations cast were frustrating and I had less and less interest in their goal of my learning to write as I was supposed to do.  In other words I was labeled a poor writer so I saw myself as a poor writer and unable to succeed in being capable of writing letters well.  I also lost interest in drawing pictures, I never wanted to participate in any crafts for I feared of failing and being chastised for not drawing or doing the crafts properly.  So I refused to participate.  When teachers would tell me I had to participate, I would cross my arms across my chest and stare at them maliciously with a pout on my face. And it transferred to home, I would no longer color with friends, if something needed to be made or put together, “No. you do it.”  If I went camping, someone else had to put up the tent, at least properly, though I know fully well how to make myself covered from the elements and protected from predators  should I sleep alone in the “wild”. To this day if I get something that needs to be assembled I will leave it to someone else, I will not even try, claiming blueprints baffle my mind, and of course they do because I’ve rejected the possibility I can comprehend them. But I will sit down and study a scientific formula until I can understand it. Even though they are way beyond my ability to formulate.

But even more, I had no interest in works of famous artists, I didn’t like viewing photographs.  Tools became an anathema, I did not want them in my hands. And all of this was because in my first year of school, I was slower than my classmates and did not learn to make proper letters the way you are supposed to.  I was labeled deficient–I became deficient.  The classification of a deficiency made me feel deficient and therefore a self-presumption that I had no capacity to achieve the task.  At the same time I was the only one in the class that already knew how to read, and I was already well beyond Dick & Jane, and so to reestablish myself in my own eyes, I demanded to read books at a higher level. I read “beyond my age” but I didn’t learn to write “at my age level”, so I was labeled rebellious and marked as a slow learner.  I was eventually suspended as “socially slow” for my age.  (Then later advanced and returned to my own age group.)

When we are schooled by age it fails to take into account not only the individual personality, it defines children’s interests to what they must be interested in. I more than likely would have learned to write more clearly when I wanted to write letters to others, but at that time, who was I going to write to, my compatriots were just learning to read, so there was no one to write to.   When we moved overseas and  I wanted to write letters to my friends and grandparents I asked my mother to teach me to type.  There were many explanations, I was dyslexic or suffered from some other reading disability but, surely I was not, nevertheless they gave me tests; but the label that stuck was “socially retarded for his age”.  (Today they would probably not use the word “retarded”).  That remained on my school record, passed from school to school.    It never suited me because I was so extremely social within my age group, and eventually they added to my definition.  So it got mixed with “emotionally disturbed and rejects all authority, limits capability to learn”.  But that is false, from my perspective, I respect authority if it is deserving to be respected by respecting me.  What I reject is authority that presumes its authority before it earns it.

Okay perhaps I have an axe to grind.  So do many others who have been classified by the educational system, not as individuals, but as products to be conformed into a system that regulates learning as an expectation rather than as a natural development of the human species. And so this is the beginning of leading people to believe there is only one possibility of truth. If that truth–I am dumb, I am black, I am not as good as someone else, is a rejection of the individuality of the “I”, then the “I’ seeks an alternative truth, “In God’s eyes I am equal” or perhaps the truth of science is not what they say it is, and so this other guy says covid vaccines kill and if science is maybe not true, after all they told me I wasn’t smart enough to understand science, well maybe I am, so maybe they’re wrong and if I’m not dumb, then the scientist is dumb and the vaccine kills.

Or maybe spacemen have already come to earth and they’re hiding them at Area 51.  Or maybe I’m poor because the immigrant takes my job, or maybe this, maybe that. Maybe it’s all just a big deep state. Cultic belief in whatever, is the outcome of classifying insufficient talent instead of developing sufficient talent no matter the duration it takes and the encouragement and stimulus necessary to develop the interest in developing the skill: and the natural need to reclaim self-importance by denying either the necessity or seeking an alternative belief that does not denigrate one’s abilities to oneself.  

But the essential problem of schooling is that it “teaches” what we are supposed to believe instead of guides us towards developing our personalities and our personal experience will defy almost all (at some time, to some students, but not necessarily all students at any time) of what we learn.  If we learn people of color should have the same opportunity as the white man, but I, the white man do not have the same opportunity as some black men, it follows we shouldn’t be giving black men more advantages than white men.  Of course what is missed to the individual is that most black men do not have greater access to opportunity as most white men, but the experience of even one black man being more advantaged than the individual who sees the black man excel beyond him now has his experienced transformed from his learning, and so he will listen to the replacement theory and since he, or maybe his neighbor, or maybe his news channel says it so, then it is true that the black men are replacing  the white man.

If the strongest men are stronger than the strongest women, does it follow that all men are stronger than all women?  Of course, not.  So does it follow that students must participate in school sports only of their birth sex?  If a female (birth sex) is able to compete in male sports because of an assumed (identity)sex, or even if she maintains her birth sex and still is capable of competing with males, why should she compete with only other females?  Or vice versa if a male, no matter the gender identification, why must a less endowed male only be allowed to compete with males he might be less competitive with at any particular age?  And maybe in a couple of years he grows stronger or taller but now he has felt marginalized and has no interest in competing, because,  just as I felt rejected and lost interest in trying to develop my writing skills at my own pace, rejection builds self-defenses against the classifications and self-needs to distance oneself as uninterested in learning any subject or any skill; and therefore the rejection creates a disinterest towards further development.   The D grade in history creates a rejection of history as unimportant, and therefore disinterest, and a lessening of any desire to learn history and thus a reinforcement that the learner has no ability to learn history and that reinforces the self-protective response to being rejective, that history is boring, and therefore unimportant to the individual’s life.  If we reject a student by classifying him as incompetent then his rejection makes him reject what he is supposed to be learning, it lessens his interest and increases his likelihood to accept an alternative source than what is taught is wrong rather than that he is not capable.  This defies experience, because the essential nature of any personality is to need his personality type to have relevance and be accepted by his community.  We are essentially, as I’ve repeated continually, a communitarian species  that survives within a community, but if that community rejects the individual, then the personality must seek ideological commonality that does not reject him. It is not that people are ignorant or incapable of discerning knowledge, but that we have been trained to conform to one concept of truth and that an opposite is therefore untrue.  But when we are categorized, our solace is others who have been similarly categorized and resentment against any that might be categorized differently.  

Now there is an opposite, the one who excels in the current system, but that is a later discussion.  But I want to point out that the who does excel is also disadvantaged because classifying him as superior, creates a feeling of superiority which both reinforces the system of classification but also the structure of the classifying of personalities by creating personalities who believe their classification of superiority is true, and so they also seek similarly classified individuals who reject others as inferior or ignorant to themselves. .  And unfortunately (from my perspective) “leaders” will be selected from this group to represent all groups, and no matter the political ideology, which is the later discussion, all feel they have a superior knowledge towards how to “make the world better”.  

I began life poor and white and so as a poor child I had closer proximity to many other poor children, mostly black.  But as a white child I also had proximity to slightly less poor white children.  But the first seminal experience, as I mentioned, was attempting to see The Robe with a black family.   When we were rejected from viewing the movie together my experience of that rejection is tied with who did the rejecting and a strong identification with the family that was rejected.  That identity would continue, but as I continued to grow, and my family entered into a different circumstance that early identification remained.  I still tend to identify with ghetto Afro-Americans, Hispanics, and Native-Americans.  But as I’ve said, I was no longer “ghetto” so it was hard for those I identified with to identify me as more than either a “failed” white person, or as an “intruder” to my own self.  But it was difficult to identify very closely with “non-ghetto” persons of color who may, or may not, continue to identify with persons of color that were still ghettoized, but certainly did not see affinity with “ghetto” whites.  But I could be accepted by many classes of whites, but found it difficult to identify closely with any particular class of white.  And therefore because of what be similar to the student of  today who might be told he needs to identify with his birth sex, as an adult I’ve been accused of not identifying with my birth race–but only by whites, because a black person's racial identity is still not going to be the experience that was mine as a white child experiencing not because of my race but because of the race that I was with when the rejection occurred.  So probably my identify is not really with the marginalized at all, but with the rejection of some as an identity.

Learning begins with these experiences, but are built on past experience. So perhaps my identity would have been different.  So the personality that I was developing, the curiosity and interest in discovering and the freedom that I was given to do so, as a young child, created my experience in the way it created it.  It could have resulted in the experience creating a rejection of all persons of color and I could have easily succumbed to feeling superior feelings that would have made future associations with black children repugnant to me, or feelings I was somehow superior to them..  If I had not already experienced a welcoming into black homes or if I had been chastised for doing so, or if my mother had not reinforced my feelings of dismay at the rejection at the theater, if for instance, she had said that I should not have gone to see the movie  with a black family,  or even if I had been allowed to see the movie in the white section separately and not rejected together with them, and understanding full well they were being rejected because they brought me with them to see the movie and thus feeling responsible for their being not allowed to see the movie because they had brought me—well then, any slight difference in the experience would have created a different outcome in the learning experience. And that was a seminal learning experience.  It made me responsible for the family being prevented from seeing the movie so I developed from that experience my inability to deny any group as not deserving the same respect as any other and that no one group was better to any other.  The only thing I ever rejected was those who rejected others. And probably that is why whenever I witness any violence being perpetrated on another I just immediately react in defense of the person being attacked and try to deflect the blows upon myself.  It’s not heroism, it’s not acting with stupidity, it’s the outcome of my learning experience.  And so I have no thoughts upon such incidents but to prevent the attacker from attacking, whether it be verbal or physical, no matter if I have some prior involvement with the persons, or no prior involvement, my methodical, well-organized life, and my general approach to trying to attempt to reconcile conflict just vanishes and pure thoughtless reaction results, an “animalistic” instinct to prevent assault on anyone.  All reasoning powers, all thoughts of whether I might be hurt, all thoughts of possible justification simply vanish to the immediate need to never again allow injury to another or to hear someone verbally assault or denigrate another and feel the responsibility of being unable to protect those who might be being attacked.  I developed as a three year old an overwhelming sense of both shame for not being able to help that family see that movie and at a furious indignity that it was happening.  Okay, maybe I am projecting, but I am quite positive there is a linkage.  

But this inability to ever accept any group over another, and this identification that I myself am of the oppressed led to my very peculiar school existence of rejecting teacher’s “authority”, as was written on my records, and intermingling with jocks, with the excellers and those supposedly less endowed intellectually, with the partiers and the recluses and for always trying to convey different perspectives amongst the groups and to arrange all-inclusive parties to intermingle the groups.  And this also permitted me the opportunity to explain that these confrontations were not necessarily because the teacher was incorrect but that so-and-so has a different idea, and that the confrontation occurred only because the teacher could not recognize that she might not be totally correct.  I always attempted to make sure I did not convey that I was smarter than the teacher, but my thoughts should not be rejected simply because they were not the same as the teacher’s.

But actually most of the teachers did not become defiant that they were right and there was only one right.  Those are the ones that stick out who were, but most let me say my piece and allow the class to enter into discussion.  I don’t think in any way that all teachers are somehow wrong-headed and  teaching nonsense, really only a few.  And I did learn that sometimes it would be better not to directly confront a teacher.  I remember our 8th grade history teacher who always gave these vivid accounts of historical events and the students really were fascinated and almost everyone ended up getting high marks, no matter if they were considered slow  in most other subjects, her portrayals were so fascinating and they simply enraptured themselves into the student’s minds and I believe that’s why everyone earned good marks.  Anyway one day she gave this riveting discussion of Andrew Jackson, his volatility, his duels, the Rachel problem and accusations she was a bigamist, his confrontation with Congress over the bank and then his sly pocket veto, and then she talked about the cheese party and damage to the White House.  “And so he became our only president to ever be impeached”.  My mouth dropped open and I was tempted to say no that’s wrong, it was Andrew Johnson, but I did control myself, and I refrained, because she had never denied me to express my own thoughts.  Since most of the teachers had frequented our house, I felt free to often go to their houses, so after going home and  up  gathering some information together,I went over and knocked on her door.  “Alice,” I told her (and out of school the teachers our family associated with socially told me to use their first names)”that was all fascinating and new to me about Andrew Jackson but it was wrong, he was never impeached, it was Andrew Johnson who was impeached.”  Then I showed her—really, just our own textbook.  

The next day she opened class by saying, “I made a major error yesterday, I confused the names of Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson and it was actually Andrew Johnson, not Andrew Jackson who was our only impeached president, so I think I'm going to skip ahead today to the administration of Andrew Johnson.  And then she began with his escape from a brutal apprenticeship, becoming a successful, self educating himself, rising to become a politician, his battle against secession in Tennessee  that elevated him to becoming the v-p nominee even though a Democrat, and then his battles with Congress over readmittance of the southern states. Just as exciting and complete as ever.  

Most teachers I knew then and the ones I know who I know now agree there is a flawed system and believe they could teach better with a different system.  Most think there are better ways to interest students and to develop thought, many favor a team approach, some don’t like grading and testing as it is,  and favor some different methods of advancements.  And there are schools who do use alternative approaches (almost all private I believe.)

However, there are still two issues I have in strong disagreement with them.  They all seem to favor the age groupings of students and therefore assume those that fall beyond or exceed their age group in ability have viability.

But, for example, I find it difficult to fathom why the team approach would not be better utilized by the subject rather than the age team.  And why must each subject be measured in separate time periods instead of letting students be free to move between subjects as they choose.  Maybe if you learn about Andrew Johnson’s apprenticeship, maybe the next step in some minds is to go learn about apprenticeships because if you don’t know what an apprenticeship is or why Andrew Johnson ran away, you won’t understand why he became so adamantly anti-slavery even though he retained much of the white supremacist superiority of his time.  So then how did that occur? Why did the northerners feel free to criticize slavery but abuse indentured and salaried employees?  Were slaves really treated worse or were they just abused by their being slaves and being held in bondage? Why did Ona Judge say she had more to eat, and was actually treated better as a slave of Martha Wahington’s that was generally treated after she escaped, but nevertheless proclaimed, it is better to be treated more poorly and be free than be treated better and not be free?  Can bondage occur outside of slavery, outside of slavery, as Frederick Douglas suggested? Can debt be slavery because it is a bond until paid off?  

Okay those are questions I would ask, maybe others would have different questions.  But we herd children into classrooms as if there are no differences in personality and if there have not already been formulating impressions through experience on that child’s personality?  Why do we assume a child who may be suffering severe beatings at home is going to be able to be interested in the same things at the exact age as a child who lives with his pampering grandmother?  Of course they will not learn at the same rate at the same time at the same age.  And even identifying and removing the abused child will not deflect the experiences he has already had and the shaping of his personality, and therefore, ability to “learn” the same teachings.  It certainly may be beneficial for his future to do so, but if you are trying to equate him with all others in a manner that does not consider his past, and expect he will now be able to “catch up” seems to indicate that you can simply obliterate the experience of abuse, and that every child thus removed is now going to be able to learn exactly like the child who had not been abused.  All he needs is extra tutoring to catch up.   

You cannot equate all children of the same age to having the same current abilities with all of their same-age peers because it is simply never going to be the case.  No one will ever exactly at any given moment react exactly the same way to the same stimuli, simply because of how the personality has already reacted to past stimuli.  As I tried to indicate, both the personality of my inheritance and the relationship in which it was developed, all formulated that experience and even slight variations in any of the above, or even slight variations in the experience itself and the manner in which the experience affected the direction of all subsequent learning.

 Okay, I use generalities just as much as anyone, but if you are talking about learning, and I would like to stick to learning and not education, then you are talking about experience which will continue for one’s life.  When one is educated, one becomes isolated from his own experience and classified into expected norms.  And while some may excel, it simply restates the pareto scale, and the very nature of the pareto scale states that educating people within a system will end up with around 20% excelling, and overall success in our system is about that.  But then the top of the pareto scale  maintains the same percentage into perpetuity by assuming the outcome can be different by expanding earlier or later educational access, or by throwing more money at some districts.  If the same structure remains,  Pareto demonstrates the outcome remains the same.  And Karl Popper’s attempt at refutation falls flat because his diagnosis or refutation actually is a diagnosis that begins that the scale is incorrect so therefore it is incorrect. You simply can’t prove something is wrong because you presume it is. Anyway Popper basically errors in thinking the Pareto diagnosis is the same thing as the bell scale.  What Pareto demonstrates is given any structure it always takes ⅘ of the support to maintain itself thus any outcome and only favor a fifth.  If anything, all the efforts at equalization may have reduced the percentage that will be able to rise to the top.   

So this leads us to the final point.  I fear Bernie Sanders is wrong.  Everyone does not need a “free” college education.  At one time, everyone needed an 8th education, but when 20% got an 8th grade education, an 8th grade education was not enough and so a high school education was necessary to improve and now everyone needs a college education.  But that’s not enough. As of 2021, 53.7% of Americans have a college degree.  And guess what?  The top 20% have 95% of the wealth, and assuming that all of that 20% has a college degree (which is not true), but even with that assumption that means 33.7% of those with college degrees are mired with the bottom eighty percent with only 5% of the wealth.  Yes the degreed have an overall higher percentage of that 5% but that does not mean a college degree is a pathway to a greater percentage of the wealth than  those who do get a college, but they will be among the bottom 5% and under the organization of our system there has never been demonstrated to me that  statistically Pareto’s model doesn’t hold true.  The belief that it shouldn’t be true has never been shown to me that all tinkering to change the outcome has done so. Soon the rhetoric will be refrained once again, everyone needs an advanced degree,

It is like telling enlisted men that the more of you who become officers the more can become admirals.  No, the more officers the less likelihood of anyone becoming an admiral, and the more likelihood of officers becoming enlisted men.

Learning therefore needs to be tailored to interests and skills that are themselves formulated by personality and experience.  And those who excel in the educational system only prove they had the experience and personality to enable them to succeed within the educational system and does in no way prove their intelligence was somehow of a higher quality or that that intelligence is the only skill necessary  that allowed for that success. And so we are seeing more successful navigators of the educational classification system have a need to proclaim cultic ideas to get followers who were rejected by the system and disbelieve in their own rejection; meaning they are somehow dumb, become prey to these cultic hopefuls to become worshippers at their trough.

We educate in a system that creates a followship of choice but prevents the choice by limiting the options to a this or that.  There is a well known study though I haven’t the source at hand, but there are many similar studies that are comparable.  If a shopper has too many options it takes him longer to choose.  For instance people will spend a much greater time on the cereal aisle with many more choices than he will on the meat aisle.  But on the meat aisle he will change his choice more frequently whereas on the cereal aisle he much more frequently ends up buying the same brands or flavors he bought the last time.  Now the general consensus of these studies is that they prove people become too overwhelmed when there are too many choices.  I would like to suggest that the opposite is true , that when too many choices are presented it is not because we have a limited capacity to choose, but we have been trained to believe that choices are polar , and too many choices refute only our training and not our capacity.  We can easily decide between chicken, beef, or pork which are the prime meat options that are offered, and we might have an easy preference or we might alternate to pork or beef because we had chicken last week.  But what if the meat aisle offered a greater variety, what if there was raccoon, rabbit, buffalo, stag, bear, opossum, etc., all of which have been in our diets, and still may be for some–the selection process would be longer, and 80% would still buy chicken, beef, or pork.  There are more varieties on the cereal aisle because there is more interest in different types, both in grains, flavors and sweetness, but primarily people already know their preferences, or varieties of choices and end up right back to those same choices,

So, while there are alternative types of media thought, people basically follow the same channel, or conservative or liberal sources.  Likewise, internet sources discern if you watched one video, the algorithm is designed to deliver you the same type of information or entertainment.  What if algorithms were designed that immediately after watching Tucker Carlson, the next video was Mehdi Hassan?  Might one start to see there are differing ideologies instead of continually reinforcing only one perspective, might people become less definite and more exploratory and more capable of understanding that absolutism itself is more illusive?

But isn’t this exactly what our “education” has designed us to believe that you must choose Carlson or Hasan?  Choose Democrat or Republican?  And yet nearly half of Americans register as independent but when they vote only a fraction vote for alternate parties? What if we eliminated party identification on ballots.  What if we eliminated primaries and instead had something like rank choices  ballots but without any parties beside their names?  What if we shortened election seasons to a maximum of two months and no one could announce a candidacy before that?  What if we eliminated all advertising  by all candidates?  Would people begin to have to research the candidates to determine which one represented them?  What if we actually had the ability to do more than vote?  What if we could move towards selecting our candidates by being more involved in trying to determine between unlabeled candidates, like a cereal aisle without names and the only way to determine which to choose was by reading each label? Would we then  need to learn about each candidate and would we then begin to feel the candidates we selected were more representative of us?  And would those candidates then feel they needed to be more responsive to us?  What if before they cast a vote in government they cast a vote in congress they had to present the issue to the constituents to see how they wanted them to vote?  Would they then represent the constituents, or at least give the constituents they were attempting rather than just asking us for money and votes and then marching off to represent themselves?

Well those are just some questions.  But before we could do that we would need to shift from teaching what students are expected to learn to what their experiences have impressed upon them they have interest in learning. And we would have to do away with the idea that there is a particular place and a particular time period in which learning occurs and maybe if we accomplished that more people would have more interest in continuing to learn. And maybe  they would become less susceptible to cultic concepts.  Well those are just some thoughts developed from my experience, maybe they are not yours.