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The difference between intelligence and education


Astryda

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Hey guys,

I see that intelligence and education (like their synonyms and derivatives) are often used interchangeably, and that there's this stereotype of education being an accurate result and reflection of one's certain IQ, and a proof of such. I searched the web for information on that confusion and found that short, kind of knowledge-in-a-nutshell article, which I share with you below. Nonetheless, I'm curious about your views on the concept of education and intelligence.

The difference between intelligence and education

War And Peace

There is much confusion in the world about education and intelligence. Education is knowledge acquired in formal learning environments, such as school. Intelligence is that actual ability to learn, to acquire, assimilate, and use new knowledge.

We are taught from the time we first enter school to judge someone's intelligence by their education and their performance in such formal environments, also known as "book smarts". This is taught by words, actions, and attitudes, from both teachers and, later on, other students. This concept that education equals intelligence is pushed on us so hard that few people ever get totally past it, even as they grow older.

You Can Be Highly Intelligent Without Being Highly Educated

Two of the most intelligent people I've ever met did very poorly in school. One graduated, but just barely, and the other never finished high school. When it comes to learning anything that they don't associate with school, they learn fast… much, much faster than normal.

People of well above average intelligence sometimes do poorly in school due to boredom. They sit there in classes designed for the lowest common denominator which don't provide enough stimulation for them, so they become bored and stop paying attention. They are distracted by the smallest things. People of less intelligence, on the other hand may have more of their mind occupied by the class, and thus be less prone to boredom. They are also more likely to be aware that they need to work hard and study in order to do well, where smart people may feel that it's easy and not study even when they DO need it.

You Can Be Highly Educated Without Being Highly Intelligent

On the other hand, I have met people with advanced degrees, including doctorates, who are of no more than average intelligence. This is not a bad thing… they have shown that they are willing to put in the time and effort to master something that does not come easy to them. It does also show, however, that higher education is not proof of higher intelligence.

There are also certainly professions which require extensive training (education), but not extremely high intelligence. Your average family practictioner, for example, can operate just fine without needing to have a genius IQ. He is following established procedures, prescribing standard medications for conditions diagnosed by standardized methods. He needs the education to teach him those standards, but he is not creating the standards, just following them… so having average intelligence is not a big deal at all.

Conclusion

Education is not equal to intelligence, though it is often used as an external measure of it. Certain types of education can give you a pretty good idea that someone is at least of certain minimum intelligence (you can't actually be dumb and have an advanced degree in mathematics), but they don't provide a measure of how far beyond that minimum they are, and a lack of education says absolutely nothing about their intelligence.

And, by the way, neither education nor intelligence prevent you from doing stupid things. As far as I know, nothing in the world stops that.

Source: http://www.amiracleaday.com/articles/2007/09/19/the-difference-between-intelligence-and-education/

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Thank you for posting that. One of my pet peeves is people conflating education with intelligence.

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I'm in the middle of doing other things, but I just wanted to say that I like this a lot. This how I feel about most of my education in general. I'll probably write a longer post to this later.

I really don't know how people can focus and study the same materials for over 12 hours. I really, really cannot. I get bored absolutely out of my mind studying. In fact, I think it's precisely because of this boredom that I don't do well. However, my mom has always just told me to suck it up... so in the end I'd feel that I wasn't smart because I couldn't study for 12 hours. This was reflected in my average grades. At the same time, whenever I would discuss topics and subjects with other people, I would always be complimented on how smart I am.

Talk about... you know, not conflicting messages. >_<

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I have a couple of points regarding this.

I completely agree that education is a poor measure of intelligence. Our education system and even work environment usually caters to only one type of learner.

This article is grossly over-simplified in my opinion. I believe there are many forms of intelligence and that simplifying the concepts into smart, dumb, and average completely miss the point of the way people think. There are those who are excellent at "book smarts", memorization and regurgitation, acquiring knowledge through research, forming and relating opinions in writing or vocally, planning, designing, working with their hands / manual forms of labour, etc., etc., etc.

Everyone is different and has a variety of things they may be skillful at and things they might be quite awful at. Trying to compare these different skills (that take all different sorts of intellect) is ridiculous.

I personally feel the education system needs a complete reform that caters more to the type of learner or ability people have. The world is full of potential for every single person in my mind, it's more that society has only a handful of generic molds for one to fit in.

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I have a couple of points regarding this.

I completely agree that education is a poor measure of intelligence. Our education system and even work environment usually caters to only one type of learner.

This article is grossly over-simplified in my opinion. I believe there are many forms of intelligence and that simplifying the concepts into smart, dumb, and average completely miss the point of the way people think. There are those who are excellent at "book smarts", memorization and regurgitation, acquiring knowledge through research, forming and relating opinions in writing or vocally, planning, designing, working with their hands / manual forms of labour, etc., etc., etc.

Everyone is different and has a variety of things they may be skillful at and things they might be quite awful at. Trying to compare these different skills (that take all different sorts of intellect) is ridiculous.

I personally feel the education system needs a complete reform that caters more to the type of learner or ability people have. The world is full of potential for every single person in my mind, it's more that society has only a handful of generic molds for one to fit in.

Ooh, I was just gonna write this.

I'd also suggest that there IS a correlation between intelligence and education. Are they the same thing? No way! Does having a lot of one help you with the other? Hells yes! While I know a lot of people in my law school class weren't geniuses, I feel strongly that the average IQ was higher than the average IQ of 30 year old McDonald's employees. No single individual's IQ can be assessed based on their education (there are dumb doctors and there are very smart line workers), but I do think that at a macro level there is going to be a correlation. Physics PhD's, on average, probably have higher IQs that hair stylists, on average. Ja Know?

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Thanks for posting this snippet of information. While I do agree it is quite simplistic in its view - after all, we have Gardner's 8 intelligences, and schemas such as fluid vs. crystallized intelligence - at its core it rings true.

Which is why highly educated people should stop being so snooty! (I'm looking at you, college professors...)

Not everyone who is highly educated is extremely intelligent. They might have picked a field they were "good at" or "wired for," or they might have barely passed. I have a great-uncle who became a successful doctor with C's and D's in college and med school.

Also, not everyone who is intelligent becomes highly educated. People have different passions and opportunities. Some choose to go a different route and use their intelligence for other things, or tap into their other talents.

:cake:

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Yeah, while one can say that there is a correlation between education and intelligence, the two are not the same thing. A intelligent person can take the new knowledge learned from a type of education, formal or informal, and be able to quickly apply that knew knowledge.

I think the fact that people conflate the two things stops people from trying or believing that they have a chance to do "hard" stuff. When ever I told people that I was in engineering their eyes would just glaze over and mumble something like "Oh you must be really smart." But that apparently wasn't true since most of my classmates and I felt really dumb most of the time. And there were some really smart people and dumb people in class. One of the smartest guys that everyone knew did HORRIBLE in class. How he graduated no one knows, while the least intelligent person in the class, concentrated on obvious standards and benchmarks and passed, well eventually.

The thing is that people achieve in the "hard stuff" like math and science not based on intelligence, while that does help, but mainly based on the amount of work you put into it. Math and science aren't only for "smart" people but people who have and interest and are willing to put in the time.

But I do have to admit the more abstract certain concepts get in certain fields intelligence does pay a factor in how well you adapt and grow in the field and how quickly you are able recognize, apply, and connect different bits of knowledge and concepts to a particular situation. And it doesn't really need to do much with memorizing things, but truly understanding concepts.

I recently read an article about South Korean schools and how they are trying to figure out ways to reform them. But you may wonder why they would want to reform a system that puts them at the top of the list of academic performance? But the thing that they recognize is that their school system is highly inefficient. The students study over 14 hours a day to get those high scores, but does one really need to study and memorize that hard to get good grades? Finland doesn't need to. Just sitting there all day trying to memorize stuff, would just be the death of me, to be honest.

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To expand on my original comment, I have been told (on here at least), that I'm intelligent.

I've never been to college. In fact, in 2004, I was 3 or so credits shy of graduating that year. Went to another high school in '04-'05, dropped out near the end of the year. Went to an adult school in September '05. Eventually took a couple of courses in '06. Was gonna enroll again, as I still needed another credit or two to graduate, they didn't have the course I wanted to take due to low demand. Went to another adult school, finally finished and ended up getting my diploma in November '07 at the age of 22.

That's why I (personally) find conflating education with intelligence to be, well, stupid.

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SorryNotSorry

...and that's why dropouts continue to start businesses which eventually grow to become big, profitable companies, while their more highly educated rivals just barely squeak by and complain that the dropouts don't "deserve" success because they didn't parrot every useless bit of curriculum that was shoved in front of them. What a crock!

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...and that's why dropouts continue to start businesses which eventually grow to become big, profitable companies, while their more highly educated rivals just barely squeak by and complain that the dropouts don't "deserve" success because they didn't parrot every useless bit of curriculum that was shoved in front of them. What a crock!

Lots of educated people start successful businesses too.

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...and that's why dropouts continue to start businesses which eventually grow to become big, profitable companies, while their more highly educated rivals just barely squeak by and complain that the dropouts don't "deserve" success because they didn't parrot every useless bit of curriculum that was shoved in front of them. What a crock!

Lots of educated people start successful businesses too.

And lots of drop-outs start businesses which soon fail.

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I personally find that I am able to understand and analyze difficult material that can be filled with medical or science mumbo-jumbo, and am an incredibly patient learner, but I am awful at memorization. That last part often makes me feel a lot less intelligent in certain situations where I am not immersed in what I am learning or teaching.

I think I have my dad's natural sense of business, and would love to start my own someday.

I really don't put much stock into whether someone has attended school to be honest.

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Moved from Off-A to Philosophy, Politics and Science.

Faelights,

Temp. Off-A Moderator.

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Entrepreneurs start businesses. Smart entrepreneurs know how to keep the business running, no matter how much education they have received.

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SorryNotSorry

...and that's why dropouts continue to start businesses which eventually grow to become big, profitable companies, while their more highly educated rivals just barely squeak by and complain that the dropouts don't "deserve" success because they didn't parrot every useless bit of curriculum that was shoved in front of them. What a crock!

Lots of educated people start successful businesses too.

And lots of drop-outs start businesses which soon fail.

Still, it keeps happening. TTBOMK nobody has been denied a business license just because they never finished high school or college... though a lot of people probably wish that were the case.

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Calligraphette_Coe

Intelligence is somewhat like the measure of the capabilities of a computer to quickly process any amount of data fed into it to arrive at solutions or construct models. Education is the data.

The two meet, hand in glove, at the programming interface. Humans, unlike computers, are self-programming, and the elegance of programming solutions for particular problems is what separates humans from idiot savant machines. Part of education _should_ be in how to think creatively and create that elegance, but many times education is more like accounting-- just rank bean counting, driven only my means and ends. Too, what often passes for education is only indoctrination masquerading as impartial data, a program driven only by its own programming agenda.

Intelligence creating those elegant solutions after a lot of hard work is like a Kodak moment on Christmas Day, while education is like every other day of the year. Keep believing in the gift, because educated people are on record as telling Einstein that he would never amount to much.

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SorryNotSorry

The US educational system is based largely on students' ability to regurgitate information. This is why a lot of students are terrified of hands-on learning.

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The US educational system is based largely on students' ability to regurgitate information. This is why a lot of students are terrified of hands-on learning.

Well I won't go that far. I have went to school with many international students like India and China, and at times while they are pretty smart, I am surprised that they never actually did that much first hand. Even some of my Indian professors criticized the school system, while they do get good scores, in the end they might not end up with a useful way to use their knowledge. I heard the analogy that to study a type of tree, they will read as many facts as possible about the species, they will memorize uses, chemical composition, the climate they are grown in, etc etc. They will read a and memorize a bunch of facts, while it is more likely in the US that they will actually physically go to the tree. So like we will actually dissect frogs, instead another country just opts to have the students memorize the anatomy of the frog by studying a book.

Also I have read that while US students don't compete very well in standardized tests, US students are actually better in terms of creativity. There is a problem in Chinese colleges where plagiarism is a problem and many times they plagiarize from US papers, where it is a bit harder to correlate to the original paper after translation. And the reason they plagiarize from the US is that they have trouble figuring out what they want to write a paper about, study, test, etc when the decision is up to them. To think of a dissertation or a project you want to do takes some creativity, but when the Chinese have to do it, they totally freeze up. Literally, I have seen it in class and it is one of those gut wrenching embarrassing moments where you just want the other person's humiliation to end. It doesn't help when you have a professor that has no qualms about ripping a student's insecurities apart. And the worst part is that he tapes it, and then everyone has to watch the bloodbath... again.

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I personally find that I am able to understand and analyze difficult material that can be filled with medical or science mumbo-jumbo, and am an incredibly patient learner, but I am awful at memorization. That last part often makes me feel a lot less intelligent in certain situations where I am not immersed in what I am learning or teaching.

Me too!! In physics, for example, I couldn't for the life of me remember any formulas, but I could recreate the formulas because I understood the concepts. As a philosophy major, my memory was a problem... everyone else was quoting this philosopher and that philosopher, and I could discuss concepts, but I never remembered actual quotations.

I have one of those degrees that makes people say "OMG you must be so smart!". My response always is "well I went to school for it and they taught me how to do it. It's not like I made up "The Law"."

I think most people can be trained in most professions. The only thing that differentiates an engineer from a lawyer from a nurse from a doctor from a telemarketer is training.

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SorryNotSorry

In physics, for example, I couldn't for the life of me remember any formulas, but I could recreate the formulas because I understood the concepts. As a philosophy major, my memory was a problem... everyone else was quoting this philosopher and that philosopher, and I could discuss concepts, but I never remembered actual quotations.

You and I see the forest, but most people just see trees. For whatever reason, it takes a person who has a knack for putting 2 and 2 together (or thinking in 180-degree terms) to see the big picture, but OTOH throwing broad concepts around as if they were footballs is not always such a hot idea either.

I think most people can be trained in most professions. The only thing that differentiates an engineer from a lawyer from a nurse from a doctor from a telemarketer is training.

Hell, I didn't think I could learn woodworking until I tried it in high school and got hooked on it. Now look, I've taught myself how to build just about every geometric shape short of a geodesic dome out of wood. My mother OTOH either couldn't or wouldn't bother to learn the same sort of simple geometry I did (and I'm f'ing dyscalculic!!!), but nevertheless she fancied herself quite the builder... as a result, all her homemade furniture and carpentry had a Frankenstein-monster look to it, and what passed for 45-degree angles looked like the side of a Mexican step pyramid. :wacko:

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  • 2 weeks later...

The ability to learn is inborn some people are born bright. Education tries to teach new skills. Which a person who is rather intelligent would be able to learn faster than the normal person. There is also a difference between intelligence, and smarts. There are highly intelligent people that are not really smart because they do not make smart decisions.

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endplusone

The ability to learn is inborn some people are born bright.

Ha! And how is 'brightness' measured? Using cultural variables.

That's the one thing missing from the quote that the OP posted. If intelligence is an ability, then most people are intelligent because they have the capacity for taking in and processing information. But then the article starts dividing low, average, and high intelligence without indicating how it constructed this scale.

I always suggest reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. It's not formal social science per se (and making complex issues accessible to the general public is effective), but he gets the idea across well.

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I agree to an extent. As others said, there is probably a correlation but it's not an absolute rule nor are they the same thing. And as someone else above me said, there are different intelligences and different ways to measure them.

But, it is annoying when people equate education with intelligence. One of my pet peeves as a nurse is when people automatically think I'm a nurse because I'm not smart enough for med school or think doctors are the smartest people in the hospital *facepalm* They fail to consider that each trained health care provider in the hospital has a very specific skill set and amount of knowledge, or that some even have more advanced degrees (for example, how many people know our social worker has a Master's degree?)

I personally find that I am able to understand and analyze difficult material that can be filled with medical or science mumbo-jumbo, and am an incredibly patient learner, but I am awful at memorization. That last part often makes me feel a lot less intelligent in certain situations where I am not immersed in what I am learning or teaching.

Me too!! In physics, for example, I couldn't for the life of me remember any formulas, but I could recreate the formulas because I understood the concepts. As a philosophy major, my memory was a problem... everyone else was quoting this philosopher and that philosopher, and I could discuss concepts, but I never remembered actual quotations.

Haha, me too! I used to think I was really good at memorizing until I realized that I was really just understanding concepts and manipulating them in such a way that I understood them. It's why I can't explain my thought process to anyone. It works out in my brain but when I try to put the thoughts into words, it doesn't come out right. I almost need to draw out a "thought map"...but even then, I'm not sure if it would make any sense to anyone but me xD

This was most prominent to me in one math class where we were learning to draw functions. Our teacher taught it in a very sequential way - as in, starting with the details first and then at the end, wrapping them all up and tying them together. I was totally confused about it all (for a class I was doing very well in until that point) until that final lesson, when she put it all together and showed us how they relate to the big picture. After that, I passed the tests with flying colours because I finally knew how everything related to each other and came out as one function.

I think most people can be trained in most professions. The only thing that differentiates an engineer from a lawyer from a nurse from a doctor from a telemarketer is training.

I think we all have our specific talents, which would differentiate a good engineer from a bad engineer, a bad nurse from a good nurse, etc. Training can only teach so much. For example, if you want to be a nurse or doctor, you have to be able to work well with people and care about them to be truly successful. Training cannot teach you that. However, the hard skills and the knowledge can be taught, that much I agree on.

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Intelligence and education is relative to each individuals.

In my opinion

Intelligence-The overall skills and powers and efficiency in performing functions of the brain in order to perform tasks.

Education-Resources as in one can get an education anywhere though some are better or worse depending on the kind of education and individuals.

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SorryNotSorry

For those who still don't get the gist of this topic, consider the plight of someone who's been sheltered from the mean streets and fed book-learning all his life, and plunk him down in the middle of the meanest ghetto you can think of. :o

No kidding, I have a neighbor who fits that description exactly.

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Mismatched

For those who still don't get the gist of this topic, consider the plight of someone who's been sheltered from the mean streets and fed book-learning all his life, and plunk him down in the middle of the meanest ghetto you can think of. :o

No kidding, I have a neighbor who fits that description exactly.

I would say that I wasn't exactly sheltered from the "mean streets" just that it wasn't available where I lived. But yeah I need to my hand held walking through, lets say, the streets of Chicago.

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