Being Intelligent is not the same as being Educated

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Intelligence is one of the most studied topics in psychology yet there is so much confusion and misperceptions about intelligence. There are many definition of intelligence but none of them can define the whole concept of intelligence but the definition by Wechsler somewhat accumulate the aspects of intelligence.

 "... the global capacity of a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment."

Every theorist of intelligence has put some light upon different aspects of intelligence so by relying on just one definition could lead to disastrous results.

In educational institutions we often determine a person’s intelligence by their academic achievements therefore blurring the fine line between intelligence and education. Because of this made up overlap we often judge a person’s intelligence in a wrong way. Intelligence is a capacity, the ability to be able to learn new things and produce something, it cannot be evaluated merely on the ground of their academic achievements which is mainly their scores on exams.

Another mistake we often make is call an uneducated person as an unintelligent person which is totally wrong. A person can be uneducated due many different factors but it doesn’t imply that the person do not have the ability to be educated. If that person was schooled, the person could easily be educated like any other educated person. When there’s a talk about less intelligence and more intelligent person, it refers to the ability to learn new skills, reason well, make sound decisions and many more “cognitive” functions. A less intelligent person is the one who has a deficit in learning new thing, such people are intellectually disabled (formally mental retardation). Carrying out daily activities such as bathing, grooming oneself is a difficult task for them.                                                                        

We often think that farmers, labourers are not intelligent people that’s why they are doing what they are doing, which is totally incorrect and a big misinterpretation, they are intelligent, that’s why they are able to do what they do. Intelligence is also the ability to carry out skilled work. Intelligence has different forms. As beautifully stated in Howard Gardner’s Multiple theory of Intelligence. The theory differentiates human intelligence into specific 'modalities', rather than seeing intelligence as dominated by a single general ability. He stated different types of intelligence such as musical, visual, linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. So the farmers are high on naturalistic intelligence as they have great knowledge about plants, seasons, fertilizers, different soils, which we, living in the metropolitan cities might not have. It would be wrong to conclude that they are not intelligent people. Because they are intelligence they are able to use smartphones and new technologies even when they cannot read and write. One reason that they are uneducated is because they never got a chance to be. This can be explained by the fact that children coming from weaker economic sections whose parents are uneducated do wonders and crack exams like IAS. Someone coming from a weaker economic sections or having uneducated parents doesn’t automatically deprive them of intelligence as these factors do not go together.