I've been arguing recently that the typical sort of school curriculum in
western countries of the last century has been increasingly biased towards
the sort of articulateness of the middle class and this militates against
working class and deprived children almost from the earliest years at school.
This has two unfortunate effects. Firstly, the school experience labels a
substantial proportion of children as failures by the time they're about 16
-- that is, when they're beginning to think seriously about their status
and role in life and the sort of job they'd be capable of doing. (I would
put this failed proportion at about 30-40% in England.) Secondly, the same
sort of school experience deprives them of the sort of practical skills
that would stand them in good stead in later life, particularly if they
find themselves out of work in an economic recession and have to try new
employment niches.
Accordingly, I was much encouraged to read of the research of Prof Robert
Sternberg of Yale U. The following is a precis of an article by Dr Raj
Persaud of the Maudsley Hospital, London, in today's Financial Times.
(Persaud is as eminent a psychologist in England as Sternberg is in the US.
Sternberg's original paper is "Analytical, creative and practical
intelligence as predictors of adaptive functioning", Intelligence 2001, Vol
XXIX, pp57-73.)
<<<<
PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE
Employers still complain that young people still lack the basic skills to
succeed at work. The answer could lie in a study by Prof Robert Sternberg,
one of the world's leading experts on intelligence. His research reveals
the existence of a totally new variety: practical intelligence.
Prof Sternberg's astonishing finding is that practical intelligence (PQ),
which predicts success in real life, has an inverse relationship with
academic intelligence. The more practically intelligent you are the less
likely you are to succeed at school or university. Similarly, the more
paper qualifications you hold, and the higher your grades, the less able
you are to cope with problems of everyday life and the lower your score in
practical intelligence.
IQ as a concept is more than 100 years old and was supposed to eplain why
some people excelled at a variety of intellectual tasks. But IQ ran into
trouble when it became apparent that some high scorers failed to achieve in
real life what was predicted by their test results.
Emotional intelligence (EQ), which emerged as a fashionable topic a decade
ago was supposed to explain this defecit. EQ includes the abilities to
motivate yourself and persist in the face of frustration; to control
impulses; and to understand and empathise with others. It suggested that to
succeed in real lie, people needed these sorts of emotional skills as well
as intellectual skills.
However, both EQ and IQ scores are poor predictors of success in real life.
Only up to 25% of high achievers turn out to be good job performers.
Accordingly Prof Sternberg's research group at Yale began from a different
starting position. Instead of grading intelligence and investigating
whether it correlated with success, his team first assessed the
intelligence (IQ, EQ and PQ) of those who were already thriving.
PQ questions are usually open-ended, such as "If you were travelling by car
and got stranded on a motorway during a blizzard, what would you do?"
Therefore, some of these questions have many answers, and depended on
practical knowledge that the testees had picked up during life -- often
without consciousness awareness or actual practice. This sort of experience
is ficciult, and often impossible to articulate, and this is why it has
been so hard to identify and become researchable.
The notion that people acquire knowledge without awareness of what is being
learned is reflected in what is colloquially called "learning by doing"
[KH: in England, this is also called "sitting next to Nellie"] or, by the
academics, as "tacit learning".
The important point about tacit learning is that no-one teaches it in a
formal way, in spite of its importance to good performance. Usually, you
have to learn it for yourself. In contrast to IQ, the essential quality of
PQ is about knowing "how", not necessarily about knowing facts.
PQ also resolves a previously unexplained paradox in that IQ usually
declines when formal education ends, and yet ability to solve practical
problems increases (at least as reported by those subjects whom Prof
Sternberg investigated).
The key implication for organisations and companies with many different
problems to solve is that personnel with paper qualifications and high IQs
are by no means the total answer. They also need to recruit people with
high PQ scores.
>>>>
Of course, in writing such the article for the FT, Persaud confined himself
to the benefits for companies. From Futurework List's point of view, I
think that Sternberg's new concept of PQ needs to be considered when
thinking about the preparation (or lack of it) that children receive at
school for th world of work. What's good for General Motors is also good
for the individual.
Keith Hudson
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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