Yup, you’re convincing me; however, what about autistic people who can remember every phone number on a page in a phone book, and others who can play piano brilliantly?  Is this indicative that all brains are wired slightly differently, which could spell out special abilities?
Physical attributes also give athletes (i.e.:  basketball players) dancers, piano players an advantage as well.
Personally, I think that there still many shades of grey…

Perhaps it is more useful to look at this puzzle by acknowledging just how little we really know about how the brain functions. Our knowledge is growing at a dramatic pace but reflects only a very crude idea of how the brain works in comparison to anything “man made”. The same applies to understanding the functionality of our bodies. We have only just scratched the surface. The science of nutrition is now at the point where we are starting to scientifically understand the adage “what we are is what we eat” and why (quantified self).  A quick look at the “science of consciousness” will further underline how far we have to go to understanding what we are and our place in the universe.

What we can agree on is that for the vast majority of capable human beings is that effective practice techniques are foundational to the effectiveness or lack thereof of learning any subject matter. We can also acknowledge that each individual is different resulting from our unique genetic foundations and how we process our sensory inputs.

Harry Giles(founder of the Toronto French School, The Giles School,( multiple Ph.d - law-chemistry) was a very strong believer that his all time best students were those who had slightly better than average IQ’s but who were brilliant at practicing and executing.  Harry liked to point to a metric that he called the “practical IQ”.  His view was that the 120’ish IQ individual that practiced and performed ultimately gained “effective/practical” IQ to the low 130’s and ultimately represented the leaders in our society.  The folks who started in the 140+ realm which in this conversation we would call exceptional had a tendency to stick to whatever subject they excelled easiest in and ultimately were significantly less effective than their reduced IQ peers. Clearly, the 140 IQ who follows a practice regime is someone like Harry Giles of which there are 1000s of examples that I have seen out of 100s of millions.

In conclusion, I am prepared to agree that all parties regardless of IQ will benefit from effective practice. However, because we are all different, the benefit will be slightly more or less depending on where we foundation-ally started. 

I am opposed to views that are too arbitrary and unbending because there will always be outliers which provide spice for the puzzle solvers/integrators.

I agree with you Frank—nothing like hard work in a tough subject that has been very well-presented and well taught by someone who’s an expert in a given subject.  I can see the difference in people who have worked hard in the tough disciplines like the sciences at the graduate level—their minds are sharp!  I also agree that there’s so much that we don’t know about the brain, that we shouldn’t jump on the bandwagon just yet…

Fascinating comments!

I’ll try to be brief.  Hard for me - I’m naturally garrulous!

It is well documented and proven that there is a bell curve of “aptitudes” (not interests, not trained or practiced skills, but inherent talents).  Example:  The Human Engineering Lab in Chicago told me that my number skills are in the 19th percentile (80% of people are better than I am at simple things like arithmetic) and that my technical/engineering aptitudes and very high.  It changed my life: I swung from writing (for radio) to Engineering, in which I have had a successful and satisfying career, and have avoided Accounting etc.  Family members and friends have had similar experiences.

But:

“Practice makes perfect”.  Any skill set, good or not so good, can get much improved results by practicing.  Practicing.  Practicing.  That’s why the educators’ opposition to rote learning is so poisonously wrong.  “Every human accomplishment springs from a platform of rote learning,” as a man much wiser than I once said in Scientific American.

Let’s not kid ourselves:  Everything in life, from our citizens’ sets of aptitudes to the number of days in the year that temperatures exceed X degrees C in Kittigaziuit, NWT, falls into a bell curve.

Two things that are immensely useful to any citizen to know:

1.  What she is good at and
2.  What she is not good at.

Had to add that column of figures four times?  Too bad, Frank, that’s just you - live with it and work around it.  Now get on with the design of that lifting-fuselage airplane - work you love, have practiced and studied endlessly, and do well.

Bell curves teach you lots you need to know if you are a teacher, or a scientist, or whatever.

Frank Gue, Burlington

Well said Frank; everyone should listen to John Mighton’s talk “The Ubiquitous Bell Curve” given at the Perimeter. I should be available to stream and download on PI’s public lectures page.

Might gives a surprising and encouraging take on the Bell curve, which is very valuable I submit.

Malkin, I’ll figuratively speaking go to the wall for you on this one.

Take two cases: Cicero and Mozart. Both were born with poor eyesight, the inability to breath, speak, walk, control their excretory functions, to feed, to dress, to stand or even to sit up, to read, to comprehend the language of their native country or mother. In other words, essentially and completely helpless. Compared to the massive dependence of the newborn on his mother and other caregivers, for all these things and then linguistic interaction in order to master speech—the most difficult cognitive task of a lifetime - the work required to become even a “prodigious talent” in any one area, is a trivial pursuit and even then dependent on teachers and precedent.

I is abundantly apparent that the astounding progress in cognitive function and learning research, within merely a couple of decades, is making only scant inroads into educational best practices in the classroom of both prospective teachers and of their pupils. Not only that, practices based on a merely empirical knowledge of how learning best takes place, have been proven prior to our own exalted postmodern era, for centuries. Their omission from most large-scale educational enterprises is no reflection on their value.

Perhaps not an age-old dispute, but it does go back many years: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/howe.innate.html

Segregation of students (gifted and talented classes), then, on the basis of putative natural talent insidiously compromises public education by redistribution of finite resources.

Hey!  Most folk (example is the Howe, Davidson and Sloboda paper) talk about EXCEPTIONAL, genius-level people!  That’s not how I thought we started out and that’s not what I am talking about!

The entire population falls into any number of bell curves on 3D visualization, abstract reasoning, number aptitude, or whatever.  WE ARE ALL good at some things, not so good at others.

The vertical axis of any aptitude bell curve is number of people in that category (say, 3D visualization) while the horizontal axis is recorded scores from very low (can’t really do it at all) to very high (she can visualize the entire inside of a space vehicle and see where everything fits). 

The left (low aptitude) end of an “arithmetic” bell curve has in it those unfortunates who, like me, really can’t do arithmetic rapidly and accurately, though we’ve had years of practice.  The right (high aptitude) end of an “abstract reasoning” bell curve has in it fortunates who, like me, are comfortable with abstraction and can handle it OK.

“Segregation” is too strong a word; but the education system has to find ways (as some do) of letting brilliant kids progress faster than the rest of us, and also ways (as we now do, sometimes sacrificing other good opportunities) to deal with the perhaps 10 or 20% of kids at the left end of too many of the bell curves who can be productive citizens without ever having to deal with high-IQ demands.  We do, after all, need good people who can be satisfied and productive working with recycle materials on a belt.  Thank goodness we have them, and bless them.

From personal experience that I have recounted in these columns, I strongly believe that we should aptitude-test school children at age maybe seven or eight so that we can deal with them in ways that are productive for society and satisfying to them.

There must be few fates worse than having to do work you hate, while perhaps not even realizing that you have high aptitudes in something else.

Square pegs, square holes!

F.