A star overnight?

Responding to chapter seven about views of intelligence, it could be argued that culture and education strongly affect a person's intelligent. Francis Galton (1822 – 1911) argued that intelligence is inherited; Raymond B. Cattell (1905 – 1998) & John Horn (1928 – 2006) stated that intelligence develops by learning and Luria (1976) claimed that intelligence influence by a person's culture.

Obviously we could see that intelligence is not something which we can easily measure. I strongly agree with the few theories above except heredity. I have met families whereby their parents or parent were not swift in thinking and interacting but their children were born to be very active and clever since young. There are also parents who are genius but their children were not born that way. Therefore, it could be argued that a person's intelligence could probably inherited but not definite.

In order to assess someone with IQ test, there are many factors that we should look into. The background and the culture of a person are very important. For example, a child who is always alone and play with a few toys would not be as intelligent with another child who is always with his family and have abundance of toys and electronic products to play with. If the test is to examine the IQ of both children based on toys and electronic products, the second child will definitely has higher IQ than the first child.   

The Eastern and the Western countries have different kinds of culture. If we are to put people from East and West together and test their IQ, what kinds of question should we create? Based on Eastern or Western or even Asian? For example, if we are to test the children with chopsticks, the Chinese will be having the highest intelligence and the Western will be the lowest. If the question asks about spoons and forks, the intelligence level will be opposite. We could clearly see that cultural effects intelligence.

Finally, I believe that it is through learning and a person's experiences that intelligences will be developed. I don't think that a person will adapt in learning something automatically after he/she has saw someone doing something. For example, everyone can draw a circle. Have we ever taught that how long one has taken to learn how to draw that circle? How many eggs or bubbles have they drawn in order to get to draw a circle? If a child has learn and practices to draw circles for a month but another has just learned  for two days, could it be fair that we test them on drawing circles and measure their intelligence?

Therefore, I would like to conclude that even though intelligence could be inherited, however, it depends on the scope of learning, culture and how much a person is exposed to others and situations. People' intelligence should not be measured if these kind of circumstances are not being taking into consideration.

- Eagle -