When Leah was a freshman in high school, she enjoyed her new friends and she liked some of her teachers. But she had a fierce need to learn and school was not nearly exciting enough for her. There was so much deadening stuff, memorizing endless facts that were totally irrelevant to her life. She felt a real sadness because there was so much she desperately wanted to learn. She had a wonderful randomness that often took hold of her and, when that happened, her focus was so intense time became meaningless. Her teachers came to regard her randomness as a liability. They felt it took her away from “the things she needed to know.” When she asked her teachers why she had to memorize things that had no meaning in her life, they answered, “You’ll need to know this later on,” or “You want good grades to get into college, don’t you?” or they simply frowned and ignored her questions.

At first she persevered, trying to add excitement to her studies by coming up with variations on assignments. In place of an essay, she offered to interview people and present her findings in a skit. Instead of a juvenile justice report to be encapsulated from her social studies text, she asked to be allowed to go to juvenile court and see for herself. Her teachers seldom agreed to her proposals and after a while she stopped trying. She had natural leadership talent and fulfilled this ability through her extracurricular activities, the one part of school she came to love. For her fierce need to learn she turned outside of school, where her randomness wasn’t enough without the necessary structure a true education provides She graduated, but the time spent was not happy or rewarding, and she has believed ever since that real learning does not happen in school. If you ask her today what she remembers most about high school, she will smile ruefully and repeat the question put to her most often, “Leah, why can’t you be like everyone else?”

What is intelligence if not the ability to face problems in an unprogrammed (creative) manner? The notion that such a nebulous, socially defined concept as intelligence might be identified as a “thing” with a locus in the brain and a definite degree of heritability—and that it might be measured as a single number thus permitting a unilinear ranking of people according to the amount they possess is a principal error… one that has reverberated throughout the country and has affected millions of lives.
—Stephen Jay Gould

Intelligence is a complex, interdependent system whereby we make meaning through experiencing life, understanding knowledge, solving problems and making decisions, and creating and shaping environments that sustain and renew our growth and well-being. The entire process is one of meaning-making, a process that leads us to understand how we are both of life and in life. Researchers and educators have long sought to measure intelligence, usually to rank people in terms of how much or how little they have. In light of the complexity of intelligence, the results are ludicrous. The paltry measures used are clearly insufficient to even begin to measure the capacity each of us has for knowing. “Knowing” —think of all that means.

Knowing is:
Knowing what it is—is to experience and internalize the knowledge.
Knowing that—is about information.
Knowing how—is body knowledge, being able to do.
Knowing your way around—is functioning successfully in the cultural context of the situation.
—David Perkins

As long as the individual accepts and values himself, he will continue to grow and develop his potentialities. When he does not accept and value himself, much of his energies will be used to defend rather than to explore and to actualize himself.
—Clark Moustakas