Posted 1/20/2007 03:32:00 PM by Douglas

What if there were no more smart people to run the world?

Combine these groups, and the top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence.

How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.

Conventional wisdom says smart people don't need any help because they're smart, so I don't think would come as a surprise to anyone. But it gets interesting when you consider the consequences of what will happen if this group of people don't develop their intellect.

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

Sad, really how few people would make that distinction, or even realize there's a difference. I'm amazed almost daily at how one of the most basic human instincts, curiosity, has been almost obliterated in those less than 25 years old. Even engineers. Not that our educational system is completely responsible for this, but it isn't doing much to reverse. What's going to happen to a world that just caters to the middle and doesn't distill the best it has to achieve greatness? Look around. After all, this no-talent ass-clown won a best actor award. Notice the crowd laughing, hysterically.