Can’t teach to intelligence — Can teach to habits
Chapter 16 serializing of Growing Sustainable Children; and, Schools Worthy of Our Affection. Available on Kindle.
- Chapter 16 — Can’t teach to intelligence — Can teach to habits
It ain’t what people don’t know. It’s what people know which taint so — that’s the problem ~ Josh Billings in the 1930s (or Mark Twain earlier)
- If we separate “intelligence” from “intellectual”, then the following can be impactful.
Robert VanSanten, a lecturer in my 1986–1988 Waldorf teacher training, offered, “You can‘t teach intelligence. Intelligence is simply there, already there, in the child as an as-yet un-manifested capacity.” Intelligence can’t be taught.
This remark bears viewing from an even more radical angle. You can’t teach awareness. Awareness is simply there, already there, in the child as a capacity. All you can do is train the child’s awareness into one set of habits more than another set of habits.
We can also observe how children express intelligence age-appropriately, when its expression is nurtured by adult caregivers and teachers.
Materialistic education goes up a blind alley when it tries to “produce intelligence” in children. This is usually an 1800s notion usually also conflating “intelligence” with “intellectual ability” as in IQ tests. In whole-child schooling, it’s essential “intellectual ability” be conceived as only one “flavor” of “intelligence” among multiple intelligences.
Parents, who aren’t professional educators, often conflate “intelligence” with “intellectual ability;” and, conceive of teaching intelligence is like building a brick house. You keep adding one brick at a time until the house is done.
This faulty conception conflates “intelligence” with “information.” If you think “information” is the same as “intelligence,” then why does my personal computer do nothing without me, even tho, it is stuffed full of programs and information?
For males using only their left brain hemisphere, the word “intelligence” was often a nominalization, a natural process thingified into a noun. Such one-sided thinking seduces us to imagine, “intelligence” can be put into a wheelbarrow and carried, can be bought and sold, measured, commodified, etc.
Try putting “intelligence” or “education” into a wheelbarrow. You soon learn a nominalization is a ‘dehydrated’ abstraction, a process turned into a flimsy brittle thing for the convenience of left-brain-only talking and thinking.
Further, if “intelligence” could be taught like building a brick house, the last 500 years of information accumulation, “open brain, insert information, test periodically, graduate when full” would have produced the most intelligent humans ever.
Instead left-brain-only educators produced Faustian leaders focussed on external techno-solutions to survival and physical-material convenience and comfort. Tech can only ever address and pertain to the Outer Game of Life, at most, only 50% of human experience.
Adults who want K-12 schools to produce “intelligent graduates” may be initially happy when a graduate’s earning capacity in the marketplace is greater than persons who do not complete Grade 12. Yet some parents may be disappointed when they acknowledge the empty place inside graduates where truly human values ought to be.
If we could teach intelligence directly, education would resemble uploading new software into a computer. A computer “learns” Excel or QuikBooks by uploading sequenced data.
Uploading a program to a computer is only analogous to how humans naturally learn. Better learning theory comes from Richard Bandler’s later work. Paraphrase: “all learning comes from habit formation.”
- All learning is acquired thru forming new habits,
- All new habits are formed thru repetition,
- What we repeat, becomes memorized behavior(s). Our learned behaviors replay more or less automatically during our waking state, unless we modify them thru conscious, deliberate choice,
- If you don’t like the habits you currently have — you can choose again.
This sketches how “learning” connects with “habits.”
Drama is the enemy of peace
I wish teacher trainees to be aware of the the polarity of peace vs. drama.
“Peace is the cessation of againstness’ ~ Anonymous
Drama and peace can’t exist as co-equals. Peace and drama don’t mix.
If your allegiance is to peace, you do what you can to avoid, limit and reduce, unnecessary drama.
If your allegiance is to drama, as Drama Queen; and, Crazy Maker, you do what you can to avoid, limit and reduce unnecessary peace. A certain lonely, motherless, six year old boy, playing at the role of president, on his own fantasy TV show, tried this for four years. It wasn’t very successful.
Do you know anyone habituated to drama? Do you know anyone habituated to peace? Which person seems more content and productive to you?
Why are there are no tele-novelas nor soap operas, about everything working out smoothly and peacefully longterm, for all characters involved? What does this suggest about what viewers are habituated to?
If “drama” equals “excitement” for you, your quality of peace has to suffer. Conversely, the more peace, the more drama and external excitement will suffer.
Drama feeds on reactiveness. Romeo & Juliet died untimely, tragic deaths. If Romeo & Juliet had each been just a little less reactive, only a little more patient, they might have out-lived the drama of the moment and both lived to a ripe old age, in each others’ arms. For those two lovers, their habits of over-reacting got the better of them. How about you?
“Contentment” is another word useful here. When you can attend to inner contentment, getting caught up in outer drama is less attractive.
To Learn More on the Habit Body
Your Habit Body; An Owner’s Manual: Gut-brain Axis 2.0
Holistic Neurology, Our Two Nervous Systems, Head-spine and enteric (gut) brains, Neurology for purposes of personal growth, Physiological basis for Self-esteem and Self-concept
