Do I want my kids to be clever?
If I could choose anything level of intelligence for my kids, what would I choose? Better is not always best.
“All right, I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” — The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’ll start with a quote that has been on my mind since the moment I learnt I was going to be the father of a daughter. It’s a shocking quote, designed to shock. How can anyone “hope she’ll be a fool”? It’s so startling that it’s clearly meant to be ironic, or is it? Something in the depths of my subconscious keeps coming back to this quote. Maybe, somewhere inside of me there’s a voice that doesn’t know whether I want my kids to be bright: but why?
Clearly, we all want our children to be clever. Einstein is a classic example of an almost alien level of intelligence. The man rewrote the physics textbook with thought experiments (Gedankenexperiment) which show a mind-shattering level of insight and brain-power. If our children were this intelligent they would change the world.
