Education and intelligence are often assumed to be synonymous because they are highly correlated. However, correlation is a statistical concept, that doesn’t apply at the individual level. For example, there are people of extremely high IQ who have little or no education, and conversely, people of modest intelligence who have collected a variety of degrees.
The reason that there is a high correlation between intelligence and education is a result of the fact that those of high IQ are usually interested in learning. Given the opportunity, they will pursue education, thereby exuding both high intelligence and a high degree of education. For example, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who grew up with little educational opportunity as a poor boy in Madras, India was driven by his high intelligence to educate himself and eventually ended up at Cambridge University in England where he became recognized as a great mathematician–high intelligence and high education. Conversely, those who have modest intelligence usually find learning abstract concepts to be a struggle and drop out of school from a lack of interest–low intelligence and low education.
Consider these four possible categories into which a person might be classified: (high intelligence, high education), (high intelligence, low education), (low intelligence, high education) and (low intelligence, low education). For the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, the most heavily populated categories would be the first and last, i.e., (high intelligence, high education) and (low intelligence, low education). The least common categories in a country with educational opportunities would be (high intelligence, low education) and (low intelligence, high education). Therefore, a statistical analysis would show a high correlation between education and intelligence, even though there are brilliant people with little formal education and some people of modest IQ who have accumulated a lot of college credits.
Adding complexity to this discussion is the vagueness of the term “intelligence”. The Cattell model of intelligence asserts that intelligence has two components: fluid intelligence (i.e. IQ) and crystallized intelligence (knowledge we accumulate from experience or formal education). With this definition of intelligence, education is subsumed in the definition of intelligence, so that the two concepts have some overlap.
However, statements that classify the intelligence or education of people by their political orientation are meaningless, because each political following has people that span the entire spectrum of intelligence and education. I have met brilliant people from both political parties as well as people from both parties whom I would regard as cognitively limited. There are many uneducated Democrats and Republicans as well as many highly educated people in both groups. The mainstream media has been complicit in exploiting mythical differences in intelligence by political party in order to appeal to their demographic and enhance their revenues. Analytics, now enable the media to determine, by race, gender and age, who is tuning in to their programming and they “skew” the news to appeal to their demographic. This has contributed to the tribal nature of the recent election, dividing people into polarized groups with hostility to one another and an inability to understand a different viewpoint.
Most of the highly intelligent people with whom I connect agree with the some policies of both political parties. Economic policies, immigration, health, education, foreign policies, and legal issues are highly complex and it is unlikely that one political party would have all the “right answers” and the other all the “wrong answers.” In a country of highly intelligent people, we would expect to have dialog in which differences of opinion are treated as a basis for rational exploration and policies emerge from intelligent discussion.
It is a credit to the United States that this election was carried out in an orderly fashion, in spite of these differences and that there will be a peaceful transition to the new administration. Although tribalism served our species as a survival mechanism throughout human history, our survival as a species may now rely on our ability to have our rational brain prevail over our emotional instincts.
