I found  Rethinking Intelligence: Confronting Psychological Assumptions About Teaching And Learning, edited by Joe L. Kincheloe Shirley Steinberg and Leila E. Villaverde when I typed “intelligence” to search the catalog of the library of my then-new school University of North Carolina at Asheville. This is my favorite search term. Rethinking Intelligence is what I want to do everyday.  I have yearned for a new way to think about intelligence since I read Pedagogy of the Oppressed (well, the first few chapters of it) during the summer before my junior year of high school. That book quickly and profoundly changed my life. The way intelligence is used in schools is deeply oppressive, even when handled by the most loving and compassionate educator, assigning value to some students and stripping it from others. And as the book The Mismeasure Of Man confirmed for me, our current concept of intelligence has its origins in white male supremacy. 

This book is rooted in Postformalism, the roots of which Joe Kincheloe lays out in the first chapter, “The Foundations of Democratic Educational Psychology” He cites Vygotsky, Neo-Vygotskian Situated Cognition, Dewey Progressivism, Critical Pedagogy, the Postmodern paradigm shift, cultural studies, depth psychology and post-structuralist psychoanalysis, and finally Gardner’s multiple intelligences. I am not familiar with all of those foundational influences and will definitely be investigating. 

The ideas of the third chapter, “The Personality Vacuum: Abstracting The Social from The Psychological,” written by Pepi Leistyna, have been resounding in my mind since I read it months ago. The epigraph is from Edmund Sullivan’s out-of-print 1990 book Critical Psychology and Pedagogy.

Psychology with its notion of the isolated, developing individual allows for the interpretation that all societal problems can be ultimately located at the door of the individual actor. This allows for an interpretation of society as an aggregate of individuals rather than a totality that is much greater than its individual parts.

This is what led Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts to say “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating based on race.” and what leads a reported 48% of millennials to believe that there is a such thing as reverse racism. (http://cl.ly/G8Zo)The idea that there are systems of oppression created and maintained by everyone, not some greedy capitalists or evil warlords far away is not a consideration. It may be because I have an education lens, but it seems to me that schools, especially public schools are ground zero for this problematic thinking. It is not true that we can take a person’s personality and attribute all of it to something inherently good or bad within them, just as we cannot sleuth out a social problem by figuring out what is wrong with individuals. Our society, like an ecosystem is greater than the sum of its parts. Even the teaching of subjects as discrete fields perpetuates this misunderstanding - social studies is inextricably tied to physical science, though schools have worked hard to keep them as separate as possible. This also leads to people seeing the achievement gap, which I prefer to think of, as Gloria Ladson Billings does, as an educational debt to marginalized students as a problem with those students! When that is exactly the opposite of what the problem is. 

When I was in Americorps my service was to be literacy tutoring for students at a psychiatric facility. We received one training about making literacy fun. While I’m grateful that I was able to be a part of the lives of the students I worked with, I am regretful about the way our literacy tutoring went. I learned to read in pre-school, I was taught my my mother. I came to my Americorps program with absolutely no understanding of how people learn to read. I carried with me the assumptions Lesityna highlights,a s delineated in Jim Gee’s 1990 paper, :Discourses, socio-culturally situated educational theory, and the failure problem.” 

1.Thinking and speaking are functions of individual minds.

2. Literacy is an individual mental skill involving the ability to read and write. 

3. Intelligence, knowledge, and aptitude are states of individual minds. 

With these assumptions, the obvious conclusion is that if one doesn’t know how to read i t is their own failure, so to some deficiency within them. 

Leistyna repeats that “thinking, speaking, knowing, and literacy are functions of social groups.” and quotes Gee as saying “intelligence and aptitude, as measured by tests, are artificially constructed measures of aspects of social practices taken out of context and attributed to individuals.” 

The notion that mind is social and shaped by the groups to which we belong is one I will certainly be exploring more.