Robert P. Echter
Intelligence is defined in M. Webster's dictionary as "1. Ability to learn and understand or to deal with new or trying situations. 2. Relative intellectual capacity". With regard to the first definition we have seen the importance of "context" brought up time and again in the literature on intelligence, such as problem solving in and outside of the regular classroom. The importance of context is brought out in the work of Sarason, Krishnamurti, Sternberg, Binet and others. The second definition bears little on this argument: "Relative" to whom, Einstein? We always have "relative intellectual capacity. Our real concern is with learning, and all of my students have shown underestimated intellectual capacity. For example, at Benhaven, a school for autistic and brain-damaged children, a student who was immanently going to be given up by the school because of her lack of progress and sent to a "back ward" of an institution made a lot of progress. Nine-year-old LG gained literally 3-5 grade levels and years in literacy, math, speech, language and social-emotional response at home and in her community as well as school, in one year. I give as an example of context in learning Sternberg's reference to Brazilian street children who could do math in a street situation, but could not do the same math in school.7 This phenomenon has been reported in many other places over many years, in a wide variety of difficult situations. Roger Brown has taken up context, too. J. Krishnamurti's statement that, "The classroom is the field of study"8 sort of says it.
Another issue that comes up from early on is the undue emphasis on measurement with regard to intelligence testing. Binet understood the issue and its fallacies, but Terman and Goddard did not. When a criticism of intelligence testing was raised over the years another test would be added to measure the neglected component, whether it was the Vineland, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, tests of creativity, etc. This emphasis neglects certain things in the interplay between internal and external environments in intelligence, the "transactional approach". 9
Caleb Gattegno said, "Most students who show a lack of understanding in compulsory subjects at school have mistaken this lack of understanding for a lack of intelligence in themselves"10. I have taught adults to read and understand a little of Russian in an incredibly short time, or to read and write numerals to trillions using 21 bits of information to demonstrate principles of the economy and dynamics of the powers of children. Seymour Sarason pointed out "There is one overarching criterion by which schools should be judged: If when a student is graduated from high school, that student wants to continue to learn more about self, others, and the past and present world, that school has done a good job."11 "…American psychology…takes the obvious very seriously: No single psychological characteristic is comprehensible apart from its degree of relationship to other characteristics of an individual."12