Children

[prestidigitator]

Re: Children

 

As a parent who spends a lot of time with childen termed as gifted, I can heartily say that the reasoning in this thread does not square with reality. Children do not have the reasoning power that adults do. Their brains haven't fully developed. There are some genius exceptions, of course, but they are far out of whack with reality. If you take a child and an adult and expose them to a learning situation in which neither has an advantage, the adult will win consistently.

 

Here's an example. My second grader is a gifted learner and a ferocious competitor. He plays chess a lot and is the champion of his school, far above the other kids. My wife has never played chess before. She wasn't even sure what the various pieces could do. She was still able to beat him handily - even his practical expereince wasn't enough to overcome her superior adult-wired brain. Any time you call upon a child, even a gifted child, to work through a difficult logical situation, this becomes very evident. In general, children can't think as deeply as adults (A recent study has suggested that they don't completely catch up until their twenties.)

 

My own memories of my childhood would suggest that children are just as "smart" as adults, but that's more a function of childhood myth and biased personal perceptions.

 

Don't trust your own memories from childhood, the media, or various tricks from kids you don't know well. Try playing some logic games with kids some time. You'll quickly see the difference. They can be very quick at the limited things they know - some are very good with language, for example, but when pushed outside their envelopes, they are not just "little adults."

If we are talking about real intelligence and not the game stat, I don't think children are less intelligent than adults. But then, that is because I define intelligence as the inherent capability to learn given a set of experiences and inputs. In this sense, the intelligence of a person probably doesn't change much from childhood to old age; certainly diseases and other environmental effects can affect it detrimentally; there may be ways to positively affect it as well.

 

Anyway, I wouldn't say that an adult is necessarily more intelligent. I am more inclined to believe that an adult simply has a wider variety of tools at his or her disposal. Certainly learning such things as calculus and modular arithmatic have given me new and better approaches to problems, whether or not they seem to be mathematical in nature. Does this mean that I am more intelligent than someone who does not have these at his disposal? No. It simply means that instead of unfolding the screwdriver out of my pocketknife, I grab the battery operated power driver. Certainly, knowing which tool to grab given a choice can be a matter of intelligence, but it can also be developed through experience with the tools available.