Sorting-hat education

Talent spotting versus talent developing

What is talent? We look at an individual who can do extraordinary things and we assume they are talented. They may well have some genetic predisposition that helps them to snowboard or add five-digit numbers in their head. If so, I suspect that gave them early success and this motivated them to complete the hard work that led to the state we now perceive to be talent. It is easy to discount this work, but if you have lived with someone who has what others perceive to be a talent, you will be aware of how driven they are.

When I was in primary school, we had lessons in football. Not the Australian kind or the American kind—Association Football or ‘soccer’. These progressed in an interesting way.

First, we would complete some drills, dribbling the ball around cones or passing it to each other. Then, the teachers would divide us into two groups. We all knew that one of these groups represented the talented footballers. They would play a game while being coached and refereed by the teachers. I was in the other group. We played a game but we received no coaching and had to referee it ourselves—the source of much argument, even though we were used to this from playground football.

Our teachers had decided to invest their limited resources in those who they perceived to be more talented.

I had a similar experience with art at secondary school. There is no specific reason why I should be bad at art. My father is artistically talented and has worked as a draftsman in a drawing office. In my teaching career, I have always been pretty good at drawing proportional diagrams to explain phenomena. What I lacked at school were techniques of shading to develop depth. Once my art teacher decided I lacked talent, I was left to get on with drawing vases or animal skulls with the rest of the plebeians while she concentrated on the three or four students who she perceived to have the makings of a great artist.

The way I have spun this, you are likely to disapprove of my erstwhile teachers. However, it is the same logic that sits behind any kind of selection by ability if that selection gives access to additional or superior resources. This includes gifted-and-talented programs or well-funded academically-selective high schools. It is a rational response when the resources for elite training are expensive.

Training an Olympic athlete is indeed expensive so we need to allocate those resources with a sorting hat. The human dead bodies that medical students dissect are in limited supply and so a talent-sorting mechanism for entry into medical degrees makes sense. Where the course itself and its standards for passing or failing do not provide a rigorous enough filter, entry standards also help ensure we don’t have qualified doctors who are not up to the job.

So, there is a point where the pernicious talent selection of my school days gives way to a more benevolent kind. I would suggest benevolence needs to take account of student agency. There comes a point where young people have the right and the responsibility to make decisions about what talents they wish to continue to develop. It’s probably towards the end of secondary school when they start to survey the vista of work or further study.

There is a segment of the education community who would disagree with this analysis and bring that point of differentiation forward. They would stress the primacy of general intelligence—often measured through IQ tests—and cite the fact that general intelligence correlates strongly with educational performance and other positive life outcomes. Why not recognise this fact and invest in the talented for the benefit of all. Let’s not forget, these are the individuals who are going to improve our lives through innovations, new medications, cultural products and so on.

What about the rest of us? Well, let’s ensure they have the life skills they need to get by.

This thinking was a driving force behind much education policy of the 20th century, whether pursued by educational traditionalists or progressivists.

What, then, is wrong with this view?

General intelligence is thought to consist of two main components—fluid intelligence and crystallised intelligence. Fluid intelligence is essentially raw processing power and probably relates in some way to the capacity of working memory and the number of items it can manipulate simultaneously. Crystallised intelligence is knowledge of the world—knowledge relevant to a problem we seek to solve. This is not just facts and figures—it could be a memory of solving a similar problem.

When you think about intelligence, you probably think of fluid intelligence. We seem to have a bias towards a generic explanation of intelligence and toward seeing intelligence as a fixed capacity that the concept of crystallised intelligence does not support.

Crystallised intelligence is something we tend to discount due to the ‘curse of knowledge’. The very ease with which we can pull complicated entangled ideas out of our long-term memory and manipulate them convinces us that this profound capacity is trivial and the real game lies somewhere else. This is what new teachers have to grasp—what is absolutely obvious to them is completely alien to their students.

The two types of intelligence operate in different ways. For instance, if we are trying to solve an algebra problem, fluid intelligence helps. However crystallised intelligence in the form of a schema in long-term memory for solving algebra problems is far more useful. In contrast, a schema in long-term memory for solving algebra problems is useless for explaining the fall of the Byzantine empire, whereas fluid intelligence would still help.

Commentators are prone to despair at this point and exclaim there is no way of teaching young people all the crystallised intelligence needed to comprehend everything they may encounter. Can’t we instead work on increasing fluid intelligence by, say, teaching thinking skills? The short answer is that we cannot and the long answer is not for this post. However, there is no need for such a counsel of despair. For example, knowledge of the Roman Empire and Islamic Caliphates, of the geography of the Mediterranean and Near East, and of Christianity and church history would all give an individual a head start in learning about Byzantium and its fall compared to an individual without this knowledge.

And so, as I have argued before, a school curriculum should teach those concepts that are the most likely to have this power: that which has endured. Knowledge that has been stable over a long period is our best bet at knowledge that is likely to be useful in the future. Newly created knowledge—e.g. how to splice videotape—is the most likely to become obsolete.

If we decide we do not want to sort students into the talented and untalented and we don’t want to put artificial limits on their potential by neglecting the role of crystallised knowledge, we face one further problem. Sometimes, we select for talent implicitly.

Imagine asking students to deal with a ‘real-world’ problem full of distractions and complications. We may justify this on the flawed premise that it is these kinds of problems successful students will eventually need to deal with. The argument is flawed because the teacher’s role is to guide students from a lack of knowledge to that eventual state, not to start there.

Those with higher fluid intelligence, or those in possession of more knowledge relevant to the problem, will cope with its complexity better. We have implicitly selected for talent. The task becomes the sorting hat.

Finally, there is a mirror to this argument. Rather than select the talented, should we select out those with cognitive impairments and offer them a different educational diet? Again, it makes no sense to take an absolute position on this.

I am convinced that with better teaching methods—such as fewer of those prematurely complex problems and their equivalents—more students can be successful in regular classrooms than are right now. However, there comes a point where assessment evidence suggests that a student needs a more intensive approach—they need more resource than their peers. And it is conceivable that for a small minority of students, their learning disability will be such that it makes no sense to teach them a regular curriculum.

Nevertheless, a reluctance to reach for the sorting hat will always be a sound instinct.