"Schools Need to Pay More Attention to 'Intelligence in the Wild'"
This article by David Perkins, published in the Harvard Education Letter in 2000, has been a key text in my thinking about student learning in the last year. The article is a gloss of several articles and books Perkins has published along with his colleagues at Harvard's Project Zero.In essence, it calls out the kind of learning most kids do in school as limited in its opportunities for the kinds of thinking and problem-solving that carry over into the real world. The kind of intelligence needed for school Perkins calls "laboratory intelligence", the work of "teaching kids how to deal with clearly defined problems. However, life is more confusing and complicated than that. Often the greatest challenge is just discerning whether there is a problem or what the problem is. You have to muck around and puzzle out what you want or need to do and where to invest your efforts. That's intelligence in the wild."
"The principal roadblock to thinking well is usually detecting the problem in the first place and then caring enough to invest effort, not in following through. People tend to be much better at solving problems than detecting them. Intelligence in the wild includes the ability to recognize problems hidden in messy situations and the motivation and good sense to choose which problems (because there are always too many!) are worth the time and energy it will take to solve them."
Children's proficiency at tasks requiring laboratory intelligence, Perkins has found, is not at all correlated with their proficiency with intelligence in the wild, suggesting that
- Schools engaging laboratory intelligence only are not somehow also building students' intelligence in the wild.
- Students with "wild" intelligence do not have those talents validated in the typical school.
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posted by Burke Scarbrough at
22:19
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1 Comments:
I like the comparison of "laboratory intelligence" vs. "Intelligence in the Wild"!! I aggree that the kind of learning that is promoted in school is not preparing students how to deal with real life problems and issues. I teach an Adult Living course at the high school level where I teach students how to deal with situations related to families, substance abuse, sex, suicide, death, finances, careers, stress, and so much more that I know will help them become responsible and successful contributors to society. The sad truth to what I teach is that my class is the first one on the list to be cut when administrators need to cut somewhere. There is so much push for ALL students to go to college in our district that a course like "Adult Living" is left in the shadows because it isn't on the list of requirements to get there. Thank you for acknowledging that life skills are just as important as academics.
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