All geniuses?

Brilliant! The word has invaded our vocabulary to designate things, facts or people who astonish us with their perfection. A genius is someone who succeeds better than anyone else, often by other means.

Can you learn to become great? Popular belief answers this question in the negative. Mozart was great, Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein were great. And Picasso? Yes, some would say, forgetting that the master of 20th-century painting claimed that talent is 10% inspiration and 90% hard work.

So here's the thing: some are lucky enough to be born geniuses, while others are not. The latter have to work relentlessly to achieve the right results. It's in the genes!

Well, that doesn't seem to be true. An article written by David Shenk and published in BBC Magazine in early 2011 reports on the state of neuroscience research and explains that, potentially, we could all be geniuses, or at least do much better than we're used to.

A malleable brain

Innate versus acquired: that's the debate we're talking about. And the most recent discoveries are constantly causing innate intelligence to lose ground, at least when it comes to intelligence. In fact, the brain is constantly being modified by its environment, by what living beings have to do to adapt and evolve.

An eloquent example: the brains of London cab drivers show the same changes in the posterior hippocampus as those of violinists, Braille readers and meditation practitioners. In all these cases, the change occurred as a result of training. And even if it would be a little risky to put the cab driver at the violin and the meditator at the wheel of the cab, we understand that the brain is much more than an undifferentiated mass of neurons and grey matter, that it possesses astonishing plastic capacities that react to the human environment.

But that doesn't mean that genes have to be discarded. Some people are gifted in one area or another, but only if they are nurtured, developed and enhanced by regular practice will they develop into real skills.

This should give pause for thought to those in charge of the educational establishment.

If the brain can adapt, why can't our schools?

Albert Einstein said something very revealing about the way we evaluate intelligence: " Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." Translation: Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish solely on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

In 2009, we told you about Sir Ken Robinson and his amazing lecture on how schools kill creativity. According to Sir Ken Robinson, formal education systems are designed to produce university professors. A restricted model that kills creativity and leads many young people to believe that they are stupid or at least "unschooled". As a result, they don't think they're up to the challenge of school, so they drop out and don't activate their inner abilities.

Four years later, the man returned to TED with a new conference: How can we revolutionize education? In his witty and humorous talk (with French subtitles), he asserts that it's as important to forget as it is to remember, in a permanent dynamic of adaptation. A difficult task, he agrees, and gives a very striking example: the vast majority of people over 25 wear a watch on their wrist to keep track of the time. But younger people don't have one. They don't see the point: they can have the exact time on their computer, their cell phone, their game console, and so on. In fact, people over 25 could also get rid of their watches, but they take it for granted that this object is essential for situating themselves in time.

Sir Ken Robinson advocates forgetting two principles that seem to be set in stone. Firstly, academic linearity: to succeed according to the prevailing educational canons, you have to follow a set curriculum and pass it in its entirety. But life isn't linear, it's organic. We discover and acquire our talents through chance and circumstance, provided we know how to make the most of our experiences. But our school systems prepare students almost exclusively for higher education. And yet, many students have absolutely no need of this specific intellectual baggage to succeed. Sir Ken Robinson gives an example so revealing that one wonders if it wasn't invented out of thin air: when he was young, a man said he wanted to be a fireman. One of his primary school teachers ridiculed him: "You can do much more than a career as a fireman." Stubbornly, the boy went ahead anyway, and a few years later, he saved that teacher and his wife in a serious car accident.

The second principle to forget is that of self-worth, which becomes confused with conformity to the dominant system. Robinson compares our current vision of education to fast food. Indeed, everything is so standardized that, in his opinion, it impoverishes children's abilities as much as fast food harms our bodies. There are so many passions and talents, why do schools reward only one category and discard the others?

As long as our schools stick to a single way of teaching and assessing students, propagating the idea that some are more gifted than others and that there's little the school can do about it, we'll be ignoring thousands, even millions, of sleeping geniuses who are just waiting for stimulation to blossom, but who will never get that chance. And it's our societies that will pay for this waste. For Robinson, humanity is experiencing not only an environmental climate crisis, but also a human climate crisis that can only be resolved by changing the dominant paradigm in education. A daunting challenge, to say the least.

"Is there a genius in all of us?", David Shenk, BBC Magazine, January 12, 2011.

"Bring onthe learning revolution!", Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, May 2010

Illustration: Dirk Shaefer, Flickr, CC - BY - 2.0