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Intelligence

The Elephant and The River

A Map of Our Voyage

The theories we’ll look at first are important to you because they will give you a deeper understanding of what it means to say that someone is intelligent. They’ll give you a more flexible understanding of intelligence — an understanding that doesn’t limit a child to only a few ways to “be smart.” That knowledge can pay dividends for your child. New ways to think give us new ways to act — ways to help us raise more competent and effective children. We’ll build that new understanding a piece at a time, then apply it to your child. Here’s an outline of the route I have planned for our voyage of discovery:

In the next chapters, I’ll describe four important new theories of intelligence, and briefly touch on a fifth. We’ll pretend they’re parts of an elephant, which is a way of saying that we’ll look at their differences. But you’ll gradually see that each one is really a tributary of the same river, each one showing us a part of the Intelligence River as they flow towards each other.

• Cognitive Abilities Theory builds a foundation.
• Multiple Intelligences Theory encourages you to include a wide range of important human abilities in your concept of intelligence.
• Real-World Intelligence Theory encourages you to think about the practical package of abilities an intelligent person brings to the real world.
• Executive Functions Research, which I summarize as The Director, describes the critical skills which transfer potential into performance.
• Neurological Theory may hold the key to our future understanding of intelligence.

After that section of our river trip together, I’ll introduce you to three concepts that make important contributions to the idea of the Intelligence River:

• The central importance of the human motivation to learn, set forth as a Credo,
• The intricate relationship of Knowledge and Intelligence, and the rapidly expanding role of External Intelligence.

In My View of the Elephant, I show how these tributaries all flow together. Each one brings an important addition — each adds its current to the powerful flow of the whole. United as one, they have an enormous combined potential to guide you as you help your child grow. I conclude that pivotal chapter, and wrap up the first half of the book, by giving you a detailed description of each tributary of the Intelligence River — that is, each of the areas in which we are able to influence our children’s intelligence.

A new guiding parable, River, sets the stage for this fundamental change in our way of viewing intelligence. Instead of the confusing disunity of the elephant — a trunk here, a tusk there, and only a fragmented idea of their relationship to each other, we’ll begin to see the smoothly flowing unity of a river — a coherent view of human intelligence. Now you have the base of knowledge you need to apply these theories to your own child’s growth.

Intelligence: Influenceable, Interactive, Infinite looks at three key characteristics of the Intelligence River. In these three words lies much of the still-unfathomed power of our new understanding.

Now let’s get to work putting this information to use for you and your child! The words we use to think about raising our children have a major impact on what we do, and how well it works. So we’ll pay A Visit to the Dictionary.

In A 4-D Plan For Your Child, I’ll introduce you to the 4 Ds, our guides to making good use of all the new information about intelligence. Across the next five chapters, they’ll help you to

• Decide what goals and methods will feel right and work well for you and your child.
• Discover your child’s unique profile of abilities — and rediscover it as it develops.
• Develop your child’s Intelligence River — the unique blend of skills that will lead to successful action in the world.
• Debug as Life happens, so you can keep your plan on track across the years.

These sections are the “how to” part of this book, and much of the volume of the book is here. But please: This is not a “how to” book, it’s a guide that let’s you design your own personal voyage. Because of that, these chapters depend on the understanding you’ve developed in the earlier parts of our journey.

I conclude with a Promise at our journey's end.