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Found on the Sift Experiment blog
At the World Future Society 2004 meeting, Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc. (a leading futurist consulting group in the United States) said we need to train intelligence instead of smartness:
Education today produces “smart” people rather than “intelligent” ones. Smart is the ability to learn a lot of stuff and repeat it back as needed. In the twenty-fist century, no one will pay for smart. Smart is being outsourced; it’s no longer a higher-level job. Intelligence is the ability to get from A to D with no B or C guidance; you’ve never seen it before … We need to learn how to be more intelligent – and we’re not doing that by making students compete for grades and get high scores on standardized tests. That’s making them smart when we need them to be intelligent.
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So how do you get from A to D without having seen it done before? Arguably part of challenge requires seeing things as they are, instead of how we assume them to be. But that means seeing things in the present, instead of through the lens of case studies or old technologies. How do we do that?
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December 7, 2004 at 10:12 am
Anonymous
My main issue with our education systems is that they are subject based. I think that we need to get a process-based form of education. Dave Jonassen has been pushing problem based learning as a method for many years - http://tiger.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/PB.htm Dave says that no one gets payed for what they know, only to solve problems. Therefore our education should focus on problem solving, but we don’t have the methodologies in place.
Kieran Egan, at SFU, sees all academic subjects as grist for the cognitive mill. The key is to develop the cognitive tools, not to master the subject. His book on The Understanding Mind, is an excellent proposal for a new educational process.
These are two ways that our education systems can help to develop more intelligent, and less smart, graduates. I’m sure that there are more.