Intelligence, Sapience and Learning, part 1: Making sense of our world

Credit: Quarta via Adobe.

24 July 2024

By David Scott and Sandra Leaton Gray

We have just published a book about some key educational concepts, with the title: Intelligence, Sapience and Learning: Concepts, Framings and Practices. These concepts are a central consideration for educators at IOE or at least we feel that they should be. In a companionate book – Women Curriculum Theorists: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity – we looked in a similar way at the relations and connections between the concepts and practices of ‘woman’, ‘learning’ and ‘curriculum’. Social categories of gender, race, religion, dis-ability, sexuality and class are other examples of key life-defining concepts. Our new book seeks to shed light on the workings of these social categories because a proper examination of them is an essential starting point for understanding how the world and objects in that world are arranged and ordered.

These categories have a praxical form. A praxis (of intelligence, for example) is not just an action, for this would render the concept (of intelligence) as meaningless insofar as everything we do in the world would be a praxis. It involves some form of conversion of thought into action, or at least the arrangement of a particular thought or set of thoughts in such a way that certain actions inevitably flow from it and other actions are set aside. As with all thoughts or thinking, this praxis is embedded in histories, archaeologies, and genealogies of that thought or concept and what that thought or set of thoughts allows or disallows.

Intelligence is a powerful yet loaded word and concept that reflects the priorities of the world around us. At its most basic level, it can describe someone’s ability to use abstract thought. It can point to particular abilities in specific areas of life, such as spatial awareness, creativity or linguistic ability. It is used in political, military and sometimes business contexts to indicate knowledge about a situation, or its source. It can differentiate between people with regards to imagined views of their intellectual capacity. Intelligence can be linked to issues of morality, pointing to higher and lower orders of behaviour. It can also have life or death consequences in its use: for example, at particular times in history it has determined whether or not someone is allowed to have children, be subject to medical experimentation without consent, or be executed for a crime. More recently we have seen the rise and rise of artificial intelligence, which is designed to emulate the human brain’s decision-making capacities and make judgements accordingly. Intelligence can point to the idea of a gift, such as in a gifted child. The concept can also be used to express a sense of existential superiority, as in the case of the German word, übermenschlich, meaning super-human, or beyond human capacity.

Our approach to understanding the concepts and practices of intelligence, sapience and learning, and the relations between them is transgressive, as is all our work on social categories. What this means is that our thinking and our writing cannot be enframed in genetic, epigenetic, deterministic, physicalist and scientistic understandings of mind-to-world and world-to-mind relations. It is also an acknowledgement that these enframings generally and specifically carry a heavy load – a burden of slavery, discrimination, inequality, carelessness and cruelty.

Our book includes many praxical examples of intelligence, sapience and learning, some of them horrific in their applications. As we discuss in an accompanying blog post (part 2), many of these examples ultimately have their origin in the now-discredited eugenics work of Francis Galton at UCL. An example of this cruelty and discrimination, through a particular and specific enframing of these concepts, is taken from the history of the United States of America. In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board was convened to decide if a 20-year-old black woman (the colour of her skin, we are suggesting, is of significance in this historically verifiable story) should be sterilised. She was a single mother with one child who lived in a home for African-American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. She had been forced to take an IQ test, resulting in a score of 62, and was said to have displayed ‘aggressive behaviour and sexual promiscuity’. Both her parents were dead and she had received only a limited education. Because of all these factors, the Board decided that she was not capable of rehabilitation. Instead, they decided, for the protection of the community, that she should be sterilised. The reason given was that she was feebleminded and it was thought unable to assume responsibility for herself and her child (and therefore of course for any future children she might have). Her forced sterilisation was one of nearly 60,000 sterilisations in 32 of the states of America during the 20^th century. This has been examined by, among others, Rebecca M. Kluchin, on whose work we draw here.

The North Carolina Eugenics Board that made this sterilisation order was composed of white, economically affluent, men, who believed that American society would be improved by increasing the number of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic children, whose parents it was assumed would have high IQs, and in turn by restricting the number of children of immigrant, black and indigenous people and those with disabilities. This US state was not unique in introducing sterilisation policies. Indiana passed the world’s first sterilisation law in 1907, for example. State-sanctioned sterilisations reached a peak in the 1930s, but continued in some parts of America right up to the 1960s, before they were outlawed by the federal Government. Between 1950 and up to 1966 in North Carolina black women were sterilised at a rate of more than three times that of white women (for a variety of reasons, many of them fallacious). In plain sight and with no attempt to conceal their motivation, a majority population declared a particular subset of a population to be less capable of good parenting and reproductive capacity. And further to this, this praxis (as a consequence of a belief in eugenics) merged perceptions of dis-ability, racism, xenophobia and sexism. Intelligence as a concept and as a practice was being significantly reformed and reconstituted, and, perhaps we can also say, politicised.