Stop branding intelligent people as awkward

There’s no such thing as being too clever for your own good. In fact, that’s just what we need right now, argues Ann Mroz
7th May 2020, 6:21pm
Intelligence & Awkwardness

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Stop branding intelligent people as awkward

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archived/stop-branding-intelligent-people-awkward

This country has a very strange and uncomfortable relationship with intelligence. It’s no surprise that the snarky saying “too clever by half ” originated in Britain. It’s closely related to that other sneering expression, “too clever for your own good”. No one, it seems, likes a smartarse.

There is more than a hint of jealousy about it. We like people to be clever, but we don’t like them to be cleverer than us.

How do we spot a clever person? One current perceived manifestation of intelligence is through the choice of reading matter. Never mind judging a book by the cover, we’ve moved on to judging a reader by the cover. With lockdown and the proliferation of Zoom calls on TV, people’s bookshelves are scrutinised: how many books, what kind, who by? Interviewees cultivate their collections to ensure the right balance of looking clever, but not too clever.

Some have fallen foul of the Twitter police nonetheless. On social media, it seems that reading widely and being intellectually curious is neither clever, nor too clever: it’s just wrong. Michael Gove discovered that this week. In among his heavyweight history books and biographies, there were copies of historian and Holocaust denier David Irving’s The War Path and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s controversial book on IQ, The Bell Curve.

Would the same criticisms have been levelled 30 years ago, or in 30 years from now? One of the problems around intelligence is that as our criteria shift, our belief in how a clever person should behave changes.

Right now, we like to think of clever people as being socially and emotionally incapable, as if the two were locked in a system whereby if intelligence goes up, humanity must surely come down. But does that perception have any grounding in reality?

Popular culture presumes it is true. It likes to portray the highly intelligent as somehow socially inept and awkward. Intellectuals, instead of being admired, often get short shrift, dismissed as out-of-touch eggheads in their ivory towers, distracted boffins lost in their labs, or sad loners. They get called all sorts of derogatory names - nerds, anoraks, dorks, geeks - and are seen and portrayed as miserable. As Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Garden of Eden: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

It’s a view that is very influential among policymakers, the public and, yes, even among teachers. And intellectually gifted children, especially boys, are often believed to be more affected than others and said to experience more distress, depression and loneliness.

But the truth is, there’s absolutely no basis for such claims. Jonathan Wai, professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas, has been studying intelligence and intellectual giftedness for many years. He reveals the evidence says that clever people do better, on average, by most measures - including social ones (see pages 16-19).

He explains that this is despite the failure of the education system to properly understand intellectually gifted students, a failure that means we risk not meeting their needs. If high cognitive ability is perceived to be detrimental, he says, students may not be challenged sufficiently, and if we believe it to be associated with social and emotional issues, we may see problems that simply do not exist.

So let’s stop with the myth-making. Let’s swallow our jealousy. We need clever people. Now more than ever, we need people who are too clever by half. In fact, what we need is people who are too clever by three-quarters.

@AnnMroz

This article originally appeared in the 8 May 2020 issue under the headline “In the midst of a global crisis, everyone should love a smartarse”

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