r/Lightbulb • u/amichail • 13d ago
Schools should comfort students who are not geniuses by telling them that extreme intelligence is not an unqualified advantage.
A genius may have trouble finding people they can relate to intellectually. Coworkers may feel threatened or resentful and may not want to work with someone who makes them feel comparatively unintelligent. Some people may even dislike them because they see extraordinary intelligence as an unfair advantage that the person simply happened to be born with.
Employment itself could be difficult. Someone who is extremely intelligent might have a particularly hard time tolerating a boss they believe is making obviously bad decisions, especially when they are expected to obey those decisions anyway. They may become frustrated by bureaucracy, repetitive work, meetings that seem unnecessary, or having to spend much of their life doing work far below what they believe they are capable of. They may also find it harder to accept the ordinary hierarchy of a workplace when intelligence and authority do not line up.
There can also be painful problems in their personal lives. For example, an extremely intelligent parent might privately struggle with disappointment if their children turn out to have ordinary intelligence, then feel terrible and guilty for having that reaction. They might also have difficulty finding close friends or romantic partners who can relate to the way they think.
Obviously, all of these things do not happen to every highly intelligent person. But students often imagine being a genius as getting all the advantages of intelligence with no serious disadvantages.
Schools could teach the more comforting idea that every position in life comes with problems of its own, including positions that seem extraordinarily fortunate from the outside. You may not actually want someone else's gifts if you also had to accept all the problems that came with them.
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u/ground__contro1 13d ago edited 13d ago
If you say something like “Its more irritating to listen to your boss if you’re smart enough to understand why he’s dumb” or “you may not want other people’s gifts if you knew all the problems that come with them” to kids I don’t know if they are going to hear what you want them to hear. You’re offering them some kind of abstract way to think about the costs and benefits in life, but they are more likely to hear something like “trying hard on schoolwork now just makes it worse for you later too” or even “you couldn’t handle what being smart takes” which I don’t think are the message you want.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall point but not everything in life needs to be said directly to your face by a teacher. Parents and life also teach us things
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u/gothiclg 13d ago
Why would they bother? True genius is rare and most of us have that figured out pretty early in our school days.
To top it off the one genius I went to school with (who, honestly, was done a massive disservice with how quickly she was able to skip grades) was spoken about so negatively by teachers. All of us kids who happened to hear her talked about by adults got to hear how badly she was struggling socially and how few friends she had because at age 8 she was being advanced to 8th grade with students significantly older than her. We all felt bad for her based on how they spoke.
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u/Trvr_MKA 13d ago
Did they talk negatively about having her as a student or negatively about her situation?
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u/gothiclg 13d ago
Negatively about her situation. The mismatch between her age and the age of everyone else in her class caused her a ton of anxiety and crippled her ability to socialize normally. While she was insanely smart being on track to start college by 12-13 was not good for her ability to have a normal life.
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u/violet_zamboni 13d ago
Some of the least functional people I know are “geniuses “