Who is smarter: a Yup’ik Eskimo child failing in school who can navigate from between villages in the frozen tundra of Alaska without any obvious landmarks, or his well-educated, non-Yup’ik teacher who would die in the navigational attempt?
On Sept. 28, 2015, Robert J. Sternberg, PhD, professor of human development at Cornell University, delivered the 2015 Anastasi Lecture, discussing how psychology has transformed an invented concept, intelligence, into one that is treated as though it has been discovered–with largely unfortunate results. He argued that we, in the United States, treat intelligence as a construct that makes some sense within the context of Western-style schools, but not within the range of world cultures.
