While working with students who came to me through vocational rehabilitation, I began the practice of discussing the "How smart are you?" (or even worse, "How smart do you think you are?") question. Many of them, if not all, felt damaged by an educational system which treated them as damaged. At some point, these students had also become literally damaged in some way. That's why they came to me for employment skills. The more immediate and obvious recent damage was exacerbated by the damage they felt most of their lives from the way they were treated and used by the systems they encountered. They had internalized the damage they felt by the system endlessly perceiving them and treating them as damaged. They felt, and reported themselves as, dumb and doomed to remain so. We agreed that feeling dumb, thus failed, did not auger well for their attitude toward their ability to learn and use their learning in the workplace or in their lives.
When we discussed "How are you smart," many felt uneasy about making that claim at all, any real claim about intelligence. They thought it belonged to other people. They just reported to just having "got on with their lives."
Getting on with life is intelligence. Those who don't—don't get on with life at all. We brought in Howard Gardiner's ideas of multiple intelligences[6], and we shared stories about ways every student had shown one or more of these intelligences. Often, we would add an intelligence that better defined what these students had done in their lives. For many, "Street smart" held a very high sway in this regard. That particular form of intelligence demands any number of subsets in order to succeed. Still, we struggled. The old meaning perspective of inner dumb got started in childhood and got built on by the educational system. It still held a great deal of power inside their minds and spirits. It may be the case that unless the child learns that perspective well and deeply early, the later assaults might have a much more limited effect. The idea of their own inherent dumb had become part of their self-image, part of their identity early and grew. No matter how we might dislike some part of our self-image or identity, it feels like an essential element of our life and living, and we can fear giving it up even when that liberates.
One man, in his fifties, Carlos called Carl, thought about "How are you smart" for a while and finally said, "I'm not." We talked on and got to know each other a little, what getting on with life had been defined for him and within him.
As with many, many of my folks, the educational system saw him as flawed and placed him in special education. All of us know as children what that means: inadequate and dumb—the "slow class." As children, we point out the "specials" to each other to feel better about our own fears of our own dumb. If we didn't wind up in special ed., so we aren't as dumb as they are, as dumb as we fear we are, so we were better off than they were—small comfort in a cold educational universe but better than no comfort all.
Carl confessed that they put him in special ed. Because he was "slow." He still felt he was "slow." Slow, it turns out, means to be very, essentially, dumb. Where does anyone go from there marked like Cain if not externally certainly internally—marked as dumb?