A Response to Why we stopped making Einstein's
Erik Hoel's argument is under-researched and exaggerated.
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A response to Erik Hoel’s Why we stopped making Einstein’s.
Intrinsic means belonging naturally to something or someone. What belongs naturally to genius? Ideas? No! Anybody can have an idea, even a great one, and they do not need to have had a great education, or Aristocratic tutoring. What therefore is genius? The ability to imagine things; magnificent things; glorious things; mindboggling things? What pray tell is ability? Possession of the means or skill to do something? Does everyone possess the means or skill to do something? Yes and no. Yes, everyone has the means to learn a new skill, unless they are neurologically challenged, meaning, their brain won’t let them learn or their brain works in such a way as to impede swift learning of a new skill. The means is always the brain; the skill is always the ‘software’, to use a crude computer analogy.
Does interventionist organized education play a role in developing skills? Yes. How so? Take for example, reading and writing; teachers promote, foster, and instill the knowledge and skill about reading and writing in students. Today, no less than in modern times since the Industrial Revolution, education has been interventionist and organized. So why is it being contrasted with Aristocratic tutoring? Because the latter is being touted as being ‘superior’ to modern education. Why? Because AT is believed (solely on its virtue of one-on-one tutoring) to produce genius while the latter is deemed to be inadequate to the task as if it was its task or goal to make genius. Of course, the assumption is that modern education fails at what AT is claimed to have done: provide topics of interest to a young, naturally inquisitive mind. We all know what assume means. Is there any evidence to support the claim? No. Other than a handful of examples of genius that were allegedly the result of AT. The claim is that it is a direct result.
The problem with claiming that AT produces genius and not modern organized education is the examples provided to support it. All the examples existed before the 20th century, and all of them are men. Why are there no examples of women genius before the 20th century? The earliest one I can think of is Hypatia the mathematician who worked out of the Library of Alexandria around 370 CE – common era. Her father tutored her before she went to school in Athens. While she was ‘home tutored’ to some degree, she attended classes at what can be described as ‘mass education’ though the student numbers were low, and it was a ‘prestigious’ school. When she became a teacher, she taught medium to large classes of mixed-culture and race.
To appear ‘scientific’, Erik claimed learning happens in a ‘social’ context. Not really. Nowhere has he mentioned the cognitive realm. It is in the cognitive realm that learning happens. Yes, students sometimes ask a classmate for either the ‘meaning’ of something or the ‘answer’ to that thing, but the student still must learn both things about the thing they are asking about. They may even ask the teacher – if they are brave enough – but learning comes after that.
Social interaction while playing an important role in reinforcing or substantiating learning is not the epicentre of learning, cognition is. So while Erik took the view that all that is required for learning to happen is ‘input’ from a dedicated intellectual and voila! the recipient becomes a genius, this is an unscientific view of learning and a misguided attempt at explaining how genius is made. In fact, no tutor or teacher ever made a genius.
When Noam Chomsky introduced his grand theory about how language was a genetic endowment, those in favour of it as they fell over their enthusiasm to embrace it like a religion, overlooked the damage it caused because they were too busy celebrating the demise of Behaviorism, which was the dominant view until that moment. Then when genetics arrived, everyone frantically went about trying to find the gene responsible for language. They failed. There is no genetic endowment for learning, or for making genius. There is only what the learner does with the ‘input’ – the learner makes themselves into a genius. The individual learner can and does make decisions about the ‘input’ they receive; if they are interested in it, they build a knowledge base in their heads and assess the knowledge and skills they have learned through interaction with the world outside their heads; this is called hypothesizing.
One important thing Erik didn’t do was provide definitions of genius, nor of learning. Neither did he provide enough examples of genius being made by tutors, and that would have given his argument a little more credibility, scientifically speaking. Building an argument on statistics about a very undefined subject, genius, is asking to be critiqued. Under the heading of Plausibility, Daniel J. Levitin (2019), says (p.3), “Statistics, because they are numbers, appear to be cold, hard facts. It seems that they represent facts given to us by nature and it’s just a matter of finding them. But it’s important to remember that people gather statistics. People choose what to count, how to go about counting, which of the resulting numbers they will share with us, and which words they will use to describe and interpret those numbers. Statistics are not facts. They are interpretations. And your interpretation may be just as good as, or better than, that of the person reporting them to you.”
Genius and IQ are complex things that sometimes defy logic but have no place in a discussion of the relationship between type of education and genius making unless the intention is to set oneself up as pseudo-intellectual and a fundamentalist. What has been provided as examples of genius, leave out the fact that they were first and foremost, human beings, who quite often did not or could not adapt to the mundane, which exhibited itself in sometimes extraordinary psychology. Perhaps today’s genius is well adapted and doesn’t stand out like their pre-20th century counterparts? Or less so.
As Arthur Schopenhauer coined it in The World as Will and Idea, Volume 3, though still suffering from an inability to provide good definitions of what he was referring to, said (p.158), “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Learners are individuals and experience learning in individually different ways. Humans are not the same when it comes to learning, they are different, and will have individually different experiences from each other, even when they experience education in a homogeneous space. If twenty or thirty or fifty students in a classroom, all from the same socio-cultural and socio-economic background, all receive the same ‘input’, why do they all produce variable outcomes on a test of that ‘input’? Or tests of using that knowledge and skill in differing situations? Because they’re not robots soaking up what they hear, see, and do. They are individuals whose ways of processing information and experience are individually fundamentally different from each other. Gaussian ‘normal’ distribution or the Bell curve as it used to be called is totally wrong because it doesn’t take into consideration that humans are individually different as learners and don’t respond to ‘input’ in exactly the same way.
The appearance of a few geniuses who experienced Aristocratic tutoring is statistically insignificant. And the two graphs supplied by Erik - one depicting the alleged decline of genius before 1900, and the other depicting a population boom but a decline in genius, suggesting that genius should have increased not decreased because of an increase in access to and free distribution of knowledge - do not present a true picture of what happened.
Under the heading Overlooked, Undervalued Alternative Explanations, Daniel J. Levitin (2019), says (p.152), “When evaluating a claim or argument, ask yourself if there is another reason – other than the one offered – that could account for the facts or observations that have been reported. There are always alternative explanations; our job is to weigh them against the one(s) offered and determine whether the person drawing the conclusion had drawn the most obvious or likely one.”