Intelligence, ability and learning.

 

For Me intelligence is a form of 'knowing'. Its about knowing yourself and how you correspond with the world.

This knowing allows you to explore anything from the point of curiosity rather than coercion. Intelligence should be an intrinsically driven search to expand the field of knowing.

This was not the case in my own education which was based on labeling intelligence as something abstract and removed from the context of the world. A test score or a exam grade was an easy way to label intelligence as a kind of ability that one 'has' and therefore in the context of the education system, will always 'Have'. Consider the number of people you know who started in 'lower ability' and remained their through their educational journey. It creates a language of labeling instead of a language that is 'enabling'.

This labeling of Children feed's the existing lack of opportunities for learners to exercise their own curiosity, instead it creates a division of those who could comply with the system that exists and those who could not be coerced by it.

Those who could not be coerced were often labeled as 'lower ability' of 'problematic' when in fact, on reflection, perhaps they already had developed a greater sense of awareness than many.

They had come to know the world as somewhere that was false and deceptive, unjust and unwelcoming. There curiosity didn't hold the kind of value that was deemed acceptable by the system and so they too had no desire to follow it.

If we attempt to define learning by terms such as resilience, curiosity, inquisitiveness and sustained focus then surely Children are born as 'expert learners?'

Consider a child as they explore how to walk, despite many falls the intrinsic desire to success is clearly etched on their faces. They attend to their environment with a presence that is often lacking in adult 'learners'.

They willfully grasp at objects to study and assist their traverse and they practice deliberately with a commitment that never drains until they have achieved their goal of walking, despite this taking many weeks to develop.

So why is it the children aren't always 'expert' learners?

Perhaps its through our system extracting the learning from the process and placing it as an outcome that can be measured?

(Information + Teaching)/Knowing = Learning

What is 'learned' and retained is often favored over 'learning' as an active emerging way of being. Perhaps we should look to allow learning to once again be a part of being, rather than an outcome of a learning process I propose a new outcome.

Learning = Knowing

or

Learning + Knowing = Being

A deeper sense of 'knowing', would be hard to measure, but could be represented by individual craft in that field of knowledge or 'expertise'. The act of reacting and responding to an environment, the way in witch a Shepard tends to their floc or a Gardner attunes to seasonal changes on their plot; Or even as an academic can skillfully attend to the curiosity of their students. The teacher balancing open dialogue between other's with the softness and empathy of a dance or even the way a doctor' knows the Heart in the context which brings it into deep meaning, rather than an abstracted series of pipes and chambers, the center of life itself. Only here can the true care and attention be developed to save a victim of heart attack. This old version of a new way of' knowing would call for equally an old, yet; new in the sense of education, form of rhetoric, a more broad demonstration of understanding than rote repetition of facts or recall of information for an exam.

For that is not intelligence in its most alive and emerging sense, but more a moment in time impacted my so many factor's that we can not measure so chose to ignore from our final conclusion about and subsequent label applied to that learner.

To me it seems entirely possible to believe that everyone is an expert learner if we allow them to be so.