not IQ but IP
THE INTELLIGENCE POTENTIAL FACTOR
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM and
PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning:
The Trials of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada)
will be launched at the National Archives in Ottawa on September
10, 2012. His latest book of poetry, Habibi:
The Diwam of Alim Maghrebi
(Guernica Editions), is now available. Also a singer and
songwriter, David's CD is scheduled to be released late in the
year.
That
the educational institution is presently in serious disarray
cannot be doubted. In particular, there seem to be few workable
answers regarding the problem posed by a generation of more
or less feeble and deficient students. I believe that many of
them, perhaps a majority, are truly lost and cannot be salvaged
by any means we may have at our disposal, even the most sophisticated.
They are the terminal victims of a vast and pervasive cultural
betrayal suffered at the hands of the school and the home. As
much as this may offend our cherished egalitarian sentiments
and samaritan proclivities, their condition is frankly irreversible.
The ‘window of opportunity’ for these unfortunates
closed a long while back and we are the ones who closed it.
Trying to help these students recover what they have lost or
rather have never even been introduced to at the proper times
in the cumulative course of their intellectual growth—curriculum,
after all, means ‘race course’—is a self-defeating
proposition.
They
suffer from structurally the same predicament as Third World
nations striving to accomplish in a few decades a social and
industrial modernization that in Europe took centuries, with
all the attendant ills, tumults, failures and absurdities that
come as an effect of such belated recuperations. For a frightening
proportion of this generation of novices and probationers, the
race is over before they have approached the starting gate.
But at the same time I believe that a substantial minority may
conceivably be ‘redeemed’ if we are willing to acknowledge
what I somewhat casually term the IP (or Intelligence Potential)
factor—that quick of natural smarts crying out to be shaped
and cultivated.
The
IP is a far more important category of mental performance and
behavioral response than the relatively static IQ. The latter
tends to discourage our efforts toward the intellectual retrieval
of our students by virtue of its very perdurance or perceived
fixity. We are tempted to assume that, whatever our investment
of time, energy, and hope, IQ won’t change significantly.
Or we tend to believe that IQ is really a political category,
a measure of class privilege or a function of racial conspiracy,
and thus ignore or derogate it altogether. But the IP index
is crucial to the activity and engagement of teachers since
it strongly implies the real possibility of a certain ‘upward
mobility’ in the cognitive potentials of students. The
fact that IP is not amenable to statistical distributions and
that it resists numerical techniques of correlation argues powerfully
for its viability as a category of scholastic application. It
is a qualitative, not a quantitative factor, and it derives
its authenticity from actual experience, not from tests and
questionnaires (always value-laden), graph-like tabulations,
bell curves and standard deviations, and all the other components
of a clumsy and repressive administrative apparatus.
Every
teacher is acquainted with students whose academic performance
is poor or mediocre but who give evidence of a kind of residual
‘native intelligence’ that remains embryonic and
untapped. These are the students for whom the window can still
be opened. The potential is there, slippery, truant and unquantifiable,
yet somehow palpable and unmistakable. Though it may not show
up on tests and charts, it is clearly recognizable through a
host of flexible or idiographic indicators which one would be
hard put to specify and itemize but which would include such
qualities as humour, vulnerable defiance, unexpected willingness
to struggle with new material, sudden astute remarks, a demonstrable
capacity for being reached, a sort of active passivity, even
something as objectively intangible as what I sometimes call
‘eyelight’—what in the spiritual optics of
earlier times was known as lumen ocularum—or
as subjectively convincing as the restorative sense of surprise
and delight one feels when a timid or unlikely student first
speaks, like listening to a tenor who is not Pavarotti. Sometimes
it is just a general radiation of affect or a kind of unexpected
tentacle-attentiveness one divines or construes in the otherwise
unprepossessing figure before one slouching toward the hour
of release.
Any
serious teacher will know exactly what I mean. The Spanish have
a good name for this untutored perspicacity, Grammática
parda or tawny grammar, a kind of wild and dusky mother-wit.
But Intelligence Potential does not respond well to methodological
attack. It is ‘activated’ by only one form of ‘stimulus’—personal
engagement on the part of committed, erudite and enthusiastic
teachers. And this is why the new approaches or teaching paradigms,
based on pre-formulated’“objectives’ and ‘outcomes,’
constant assessment, quantifiability and performance replication,
are entirely nugatory and even destructive in their pedagogical
effects. They rob teachers of their ardor and independence while
commodifying students into reified and predictable abstractions
meant to conform to a set of prior stipulations.
In
these circumstances IP is always neglected—and hence squandered
as a primary pedagogical resource—since it cannot be caught
in the analytic seines and logistical nets of a rigid or nomethetic
taxonomy. Its truth, to adapt Michel Foucault’s words
from an early article, La maison des foux, is “not
given by the mediation of instruments but produced directly,
inscribed in the body and soul of a single person.” In
other words, it is only the living self with all its flaws,
desires, resentments, appetites and possibilities, the self
which must be met and known, that provides the once and future
set of sensible assumptions for educational practice. But the
phantom 'teacher’ who haunts the pages of the education
documents and the gameboy ‘student’ whose ‘development’
is controlled by alias procedures that work so beautifully in
the formulaic dimension of figure, phrase, and digit never existed
and never will.
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