The Six Secrets of Intelligence

What your education failed to teach you

Craig Adams

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785785078
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Some people have something to say in any conversation and can spot the hidden angles of completely unrelated problems; but how do they do it? So many books, apps, courses, and schools compete for our attention that the problem isn't a lack of opportunity to sharpen our minds, it's having to choose between so many options. And yet, more than two thousand years ago, the greatest thinker of Ancient Greece, Aristotle, had already discovered the blueprint of the human mind.
Despite the fact that the latest cognitive science shows his blueprint to be exactly what sharpens our reasoning, subtlety of thought, and ability to think in different ways and for ourselves, we have meanwhile replaced it with a simplistic and seductive view of intelligence, education and the mind.Condensing that blueprint to six 'secrets', Craig Adams uncovers the underlying patterns of every discussion and debate we've ever had, and shows us how to be both harder to manipulate and more skilful in any conversation or debate – no matter the topic.

Part I

Not Thinking

A Brief History of Not Thinking

What to Think, Not How to Think

Alexander the Great was a lucky boy, because when history rolled its dice over ancient Greece, it threw three sixes in a row. Legend has it that one young Greek was about to start a career as a playwright when he heard Socrates speak for the first time, and that his response was to burn everything he’d ever written and ask to become Socrates’ student. That young Greek’s name was Plato. When Plato eventually opened the doors of his own school, one of the students to walk through them was a seventeen-year-old Aristotle. Socrates taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle. Alexander’s father may have only paid for the services of a single teacher, but what he got was three for the price of one: the distilled wisdom of the three greatest minds of ancient Greece.

Today, our world is almost irreconcilably different to theirs, and so despite their greatness, it might seem that we’d struggle to learn very much from the ancient Greeks, but that view is a mistake. Our computers and our telephones may be windows that look out onto an almost infinite landscape of facts, figures, discussions, essays, articles and information that would have been nothing but a wild fantasy in Alexander’s time, and in reading these very words as printed ink in a book or as pixels on a screen, you’re doing something that no Greek ever did. But ask yourself what difference it would make if these words were scratched into wax, painted on parchment or chiselled into stone. Even after 2,000 years, despite all the superficial differences in our technology, the electric dance of the human brain that turns letters into the ideas that fill our heads hasn’t changed at all. So much that is fundamental about the way we think never changes, and the same is true of the first chapter of our educational lives. The education of every human who has ever lived has begun in the same way: with stories.

It’s a fact of life that children get told what to do. As children, we’re encouraged and punished, rewarded and chastised, and if we pay attention to both the carrot and the stick, we can work out how we’re supposed to behave. This constant calibration of what’s acceptable helps us to learn what we should aim for, but it’s piecemeal. It happens in tiny increments, like a puzzle that we slowly piece together over the years of our childhood. Humans have always needed something stronger than the day-to-day interactions that shape us: something more consistent and more powerful. Humans have always needed stories.

For thousands of years children have been regaled with a relatively small selection of stories: those which comprise the great works of religion, and each culture’s selection of myths, fables, epics, legends and tales. Over and above the direction provided by our parents we have a pantheon of story-time models to learn from. We hear of the goodness and wisdom of the heroes and heroines, and they give us something to imitate.

Alexander’s favourite story was the Iliad, which is about the Greek war against the Trojans. The Iliad might not be considered appropriate for young children today because it’s largely comprised of graphic descriptions of warriors getting killed in a variety of gruesome ways – but it did have what all foundational stories of a culture need: authority. When schools first appeared in Greece and children started to learn how to write, they were made to copy out a famous line about the man they believed was its author. It is a famous and somewhat terrifying sentence, and it shows just how deeply his work saturated the minds of the Greek world: ‘Homer was not a man, but a god.’

What was true for Alexander then is still true for us now. Our earliest educational experiences – the stories that are repeatedly drummed into our young minds and which provide us with the values that our society is built on – aren’t designed to teach us how to think: they’re designed to teach us what to think.

And for good reason. Whatever ideal our culture stamps upon us, it has to do so when we’re young enough to be moulded. As children, we are the freshly poured wax that society presses into shape, and no matter how much any of us complains about ‘brainwashing’ in education, we should remember that it’s the foundation of education and has been since the dawn of humanity. When your blood boils at the unthinking absorption of ideals, remember that you only call it ‘indoctrination’ if you happen to disagree with the doctrine. Otherwise, you call it ‘education’. Every community passes on the culture that unites it, because without it, there would be no community of which to speak.

Stories, however, are not the only tool of what is sometimes called ‘social education’. When schools first appeared in ancient Greece, they also spent the majority of their time and effort in moulding children to become part of their society, and they achieved this, in large part, through sport. The poet Aristophanes’ portrait of ‘education in the olden days’ (in his play The Clouds) is almost entirely made up of exercise, the gymnasium and the pedotribe (the ancient Greek equivalent of a PE teacher). Even after the Greeks had made advances in philosophy, mathematics, literature and a whole host of other intellectual activities, if you’d asked the surrounding tribes what it was that made the Greeks Greek, they would have told you that as far as they could tell, it was running around a gymnasium without any clothes on.

Mount Olympus was chosen as the venue for the athletic competition that united the Greek world – the Olympic Games – because it was an ancient and well-known religious site. The various Greek city-states (whose citizens otherwise spent plenty of time trying to kill each other) agreed a truce once every four years so that they could come together and compete there, under the watchful eye of a 40-foot-tall statue of the god Zeus. Today, staging an athletics event in a holy place might be considered sacrilege, but for the Greeks it was just the opposite: it was a way of uniting themselves in a form of worship. Today we sometimes say that sport is like religion, but we only mean it metaphorically. For the Greeks, sport wasn’t just like religion: it was religion.

In the same way that religion makes use of rituals that give everyone a chance to do something together, and so create a sense of community, such was the function of sport in ancient Greece. When you add to that the values of a sporting culture – the honesty, fair play and moral conduct that we call sportsmanship – you have not just a way of behaving, but countless occasions and opportunities to instil and reinforce this behavioural code as a community.

As well as preparing to take part in the athletics that shaped Greek culture by getting thumped around the gymnasium by the pedotribe (who carried a forked stick for the purpose), Greek boys also learned how to play the lyre and sing patriotic songs, which further reminded them of the behaviour that was expected of them. Of course, to learn songs, it helps to be able to read, and they were given lessons in reading too. But, as the historian of education Henri Marrou puts it, the teacher of literacy was ‘third in order of origin and, for a long time, third in order of value too’. What he means is that Greek parents were far more concerned that their children should grow up to be well-behaved and able to take part in the sport and music that brought everyone together. It is an irony of educational history that we now use the word ‘pedagogue’ as a sexier, upmarket version of the more everyday word ‘teacher’ – because the original pedagogue was a slave whose job it was to accompany the children to every lesson to make sure that they behaved themselves.

It’s easy to think of school as being a place where you go to learn different skills, but in the same way that few of us who learn to play a sport or an instrument at school go on to become professionals, Greek schooling was first and foremost about learning to be a part of the group. Imagine yourself sitting around a sixties campfire, where being part of the group means knowing the words and the meaning of songs – the words that express what the group believes – not being the show-off drawing individual attention by playing a technically demanding solo while everyone else is trying to sing together.

Today, we fail to recognise all of the activities that we do at school that are designed to teach us what we need to know (or know how to do) in order to become part of our societies. The drive to socially educate – to teach the values that define our society and culture, and the activities that bring us together – is still alive and well. The emphasis on sport in American universities is one example, where educational institutions in relatively small towns own stadiums that are larger than those of most European professional sports teams, and which are packed to the rafters for every game. The playgrounds full of Chinese children swaying in a unison of tai chi are another. The hymns about what’s right and what’s good that have been learned and sung by generations of schoolchildren in Britain, or the sportsmanship and fair play that’s part of learning to play cricket are all echoes of the music, poems and sport that have been part of what goes on in schools for thousands of years. One way that an English person can express their belief that something is unjust or not the accepted way of doing things is to say that it ‘just isn’t cricket’. There is no school in the world where children are not lectured to in some form or another about the values that we hold dear: selflessness, charity, respect and a hundred other desirable and essential ideas. Although we don’t always notice it, a great deal of what we learn at school, and what we learned from our childhood stories, has nothing to do with learning to think.

The real problem, however, with the stories, sports, music and activities that define the culture into which we are born, is not that they teach us what to believe instead of how to think. The real problem with social education is that it couldn’t teach us to think even if it wanted to.

There comes a point in our lives when most of us want to exchange the simple obedience of childhood for the freedom of thinking for ourselves; and, just as this happens to us as individuals, it happened to the whole of Greek culture. Around 500 BC, the people of Athens did something remarkable that changed the world forever: they tried out something they called ‘democracy’. Whether democracy was the cause or the result of other changes that were going on in the Greek world is hard to say, but as the historian Thucydides tells us: ‘the Athenians were the first who laid aside arms and adopted an easier and more luxurious way of life.’ A period of wars, invasions and migrations was coming to an end, and with killing on the wane and talking on the rise, the emphasis shifted from brawn to brains.

The heroes of that pre-democratic time had been more martial in character. Alexander’s hero was the warrior Achilles: the protagonist of Homer’s Iliad. Achilles is the equivalent of our modern action hero: he’s not terribly bright, but he is fantastically brave, incredibly bold and extremely talented at killing his enemies. Homer’s second story, however, which was a kind of sequel to the Iliad, reflected the changing times with a new hero. The protagonist of the Odyssey is the smart and wily Odysseus, who is a cross between an eloquent and inspirational wartime politician, a resourceful secret agent and a special forces operative. Here we see a culture that was in the process of becoming more like ours: a culture that has noticed that the people who get ahead in life aren’t just those who know how to bash other people over the head to get their own way. Achilles is about war, bravery, blood, and fighting your way out of trouble, but Odysseus has other options too: he’s able to talk his way out of trouble. When it comes to having intelligent things to say – Achilles, the less modern hero, had to step aside to let Odysseus show us how it’s done. But – and it’s a big but – it’s here that we run into the real problem with the stories of traditional social education: when you read Homer, you never get to see how it’s done.

In Homer’s epic poems, the cause of almost every instance of genius or stupidity is something mysterious: a god. When the leader of the Greek army makes a terrible decision that nearly loses them the war and results in the death of many of the story’s much-loved characters, he blames it on Zeus. He says that his judgement was turned upside-down by the king of the gods; that he was sent into a state of confusion. He’s not just making excuses to see if he can get away with stupidity either: one of the men who suffers because of his bad decision agrees with him, saying, ‘Zeus the counsellor took away his understanding’. In the same way, when Odysseus’ son finds himself having nothing clever to say to a great king, the goddess Athene says to him: ‘where your own intelligence fails, a god will inspire you.’

Homer simply had no way of explaining why some people can do things with their mind that others can’t, and the same is true of the great works of religion that are still read today. Just as it was in the Homeric epics, the only way you get to be smart or brave is through the power of a god.

Every culture dangles dreams of a sharp mind in front of us, but stories have a fatal educational flaw: they tell us which target to aim for, but say nothing about how to hit it. Today we still tell stories and watch films and TV programmes that paint portraits of both smart and brave heroes, but even our modern fictions make no mention of how the smooth-talking characters who see the solutions that we fail to notice actually do what they do.

The stories of old, written in a distant ag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: NOT THINKING
• PART II: THINKING
• PART III: THINKING ABOUT THINKING
• PART IV: THINKING ABOUT EDUCATION
• PART V: A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright