Yolanda U. Trapp
Intelligence is a mystery. We hear it said that most people never develop more than a very small part of their latent intellectual capacity. Probably not; but why not? How do some people manage to keep review up to twenty percent or thirty percent of their full power - or even more? What turns the power off, keeps it from ever being turned on?
When I started teaching, I thought that some people were just born smarter than others and that not much could be done about it. This seems to be the official line of most of the psychologists. It is not hard to believe, if all your contacts with students are in the classroom or the psychological testing room. But if you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in their private lives, at their recreations, sports, and manual work, you cannot escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time. Why? Why should a boy or a girl, who under some circumstances is witty, imaginative, analytical, in a word, intelligent, come into a classroom and, as if by magic, turn to a complete dolt?
We can to some extent, and over a long period of time, create situations in which some of them may be willing to use their minds in better ways. Some of these, in turn, may even carry these new ways of thinking into a new situation; but we can not expect that they all will. Most of them will probably drop back into the strategies with which they are most familiar and comfortable. Not many children, in one school year, are going to remake their whole way of dealing with life. With luck, we can give some of them a feeling of what it is like to turn one's full intelligence on a problem, to think creatively, originally, and constructively instead of defensively and evasively. We can hope that they will enjoy the experience enough to want to try it again, but it is only a hope. To put it in another way, we can try to give them a glimpse of an intellectual foreign country, and even persuade them to visit it for a while; but it would take more time than we have to make them citizens of that country.
There's no telling what might be done with children if, from their very first day in school, we concentrated on creating the conditions in which intelligence was most likely to grow, but setting up the conditions under which good thinking can be done does not always mean it will be done. A child who has really learned something, can use it and does use it. It is connected with reality in his mind, therefore he can make other connections between it and reality when the chance comes. A piece of unreal learning has no hooks on it; it can not be attached to anything, it is of no use to the learner.
A child is most intelligent when the reality before him arouses in him/her a high degree of attention, interest, concentration, involvement-in short, when she/he cares most about what she/he is doing. This is why we should make schoolrooms and schoolwork as interesting and exciting as possible, not just so that school will be a pleasant place, but so that children in school will act intelligently and get into the habit of acting intelligently (Sternberg, 1997).
