Roy Andersen is globally recognised as an expert in education with over 30 years in the development of the school system. He is much appraised for his many years of scientific research into what intelligence is, how to improve the operation of the school and how teachers can teach better. He is an expert in intelligence and is the inventor of “The Brain Environment Complex Theory,” which presents a new concept to what intelligence is and how children learn. 

www.andersenroy.com Email: roy@andersenroy.com

 

 

 

 

 

Despite the best efforts of a great number of teachers, the school system fails to adequately educate children for many reasons, but the main reasons lie in the impression it gives that the ability of the student is decided by socio-economic factors and a natural ability. It is this factor of a natural or inherited ability that more than any other factor gives education the excuse to process children and students on their apparent ability, and then not to be blamed by society for too high a student to teacher ratio, overcrowded classrooms, students not understanding their teachers very well and so the good or bad grades they obtain through their education, which are used to predict their work capability after school.

In other words, by claiming the effort of the student is more or less decided by the quality of intelligence they were born with, education is given license to operate as cheaply as possible and then not to be blamed for its inefficiency.

However, intelligence is not the same as academic ability, and we need to realise this if we are to change the way school and its teachers operate, so that we stand a better chance of preparing our children better for the world they will live and work in — for their world will be very different to ours as artificial intelligence will dominate, if not control, their whole life and work experiences. Therefore, if we are to change this design of school and so introduce a new subject into the normal syllabus based on the lines of "How To Reason Better,” that will give our children the higher language skills they will need in their time, then, we need to accept that students do not progress through school on their limited intelligences, but by the factors of language and emotion we shall shortly discuss.

I have researched into the role of intelligence in education for most of my adult life and so wrote my first book “The Illusion of Education” to explain how this understanding of intelligence being inherited is rooted in a political agenda, which arose after Francis Galton published his book “Hereditary Genius” in 1869.

Galton, and so many of the psychologists who followed him, tried to create a scientific way of proving why the sons of fathers of good social standing, must be given the best opportunity in their youth, to develop the better natural potential they were said to have, to lead those less well bred. More simply, the idea of intelligence measurement arose as a way of maintaining the status quo in a society against the changes threatened by developing technologies and shifting social demands, and is therefore inevitably cloaked in politics.

As I explain in my second book “The Hidden Secrets of Intelligence Revealed”, there is an endless line of professors in psychology who have purposely adjusted the data they gained from tests on children to falsely explain that intelligence is substantially inherited.

This began with the founders of IQ testing such as Goddard in America and most significantly with Cyril Burt in England. Burt deliberately lied and corrupted test data to significantly influence governments around the world for nearly three quarters of a century, to fund schools in better social areas at the expense of schools in poorer social areas to maintain the status quo. More recently Professor Herrnstein and Charles Murray hoped to do much the same thing when they published their book “The Bell Curve” in 1995 and explained how research has proven that whites are 15 points higher on a scale of intelligence than blacks, and that by their breeding blacks and hispanics are the cause of crime and low morale decay in the American society. Yet, we subsequently discovered that all the findings they offered were based on corrupted information and data falsely presented. None of their findings were valid, but the public at large knew nothing of this and trusted the way the book was presented through the media. All to play to a political purpose.

Yet, as I have explained in this second book, and my first five books explain how the whole social and educational operations of our civilisation are failing to produce the calibre of the citizen who must survive against the dominance of artificial intelligence, it is simply not possible to measure human intelligence. By simple example, it is not possible in genetics to go from the population to the individual level, to study the effect of the environment because it is to complex to be measured. The idea that we can measure intelligence is completely false, although psychologists will argue otherwise because this gives them a certain respectability in the society.

However, Pearson’s Correlation Coefficients and Spearman’s Factor Analysis, which provide the mathematical means to relate responses from children that are said to originate from a genetic background to those derived through environmental experience prove nothing. They simply show the relationships of data but give no explanation where that data came from or how it was selected and therefore how it may have been corrupted.

Accordingly, one psychologist can produce data and say intelligence is 20 percent inherited and 80 percent developed through the environment, and another psychologist can look at the same data and say precisely the opposite. This is exactly what happened with the studies made by Newman and Freeman in 1937.

Therefore, we do need to know that these intelligence related or IQ tests, and for that matter the SAT tests used today, do not actually measure very much of intelligence. For example, they do not measure aspects of cognitive functioning such as domain logic (knowledge within a specific field of interest - farming, fishing, game playing, etc), causal reasoning. (cause and effect), probabilistic (using logic to determine an outcome from studying past events) or scientific reasoning ( knowing of previous lines of thought to argue a conclusion), or Instrumental Rationality (how goals and sub goals are decided).

If we are to really understand the ability of our children and so help them to learn better in school, then, it is important, as I explain in this book, that we now realise how the whole history of intelligence has been purposely corrupted, so that our understanding of what the environment in intelligence actually means has been distorted through many lies, fraud, mis-interpretations and corruption of data all made by leading psychologists to convince the general public, and so the ways government money is directed in education, that inheritance does decide the child’s potential for work and so the opportunities they should be given in education according to the social success of their parents.

Indeed, as I have proven, the whole idea of the nature nurture argument is a complete fallacy. We do not inherit a specific value of intelligence upon which this argument lies. This was only an idea Spearman created in 1904 to enable human beings to be better processed to work related jobs. As I discovered and so explain what genetic diversity in intelligence really means, such that we only inherit gene codes that enable us to learn how to relate to the world about us. Accordingly, the language and emotional ability of normally born children is not decided by genetic inheritance and only by environmental experiences. These are the two factors that do enable children to demonstrate an ability in their school lessons.

Thus, we do not inherit gene codes that determine how sensitively we interrogate information and so how accurately we listen to others or read texts to gain a quality of familiarity in this. Accordingly, how sensitive we are in understanding information is based on our emotional stability to be either fascinated in it or distracted from it and so the accuracy by which we connect to and build up our memory networks of association. Most importantly, how we then display our understanding to others, which is what the said ability of the child is really and only judged upon, is simply based on the skills in language they have been raised upon. Not some inborn ability!

Bayley proved this with her examinations of new borns, and showed with 50,000 case studies over 50 years, that there is no discernible difference in the ability or intelligence of babies to develop language skills or respond to stimuli until they are old enough to relate to the language skills of those who raise them. Intelligence, in the sense of the general child in school, is only environmental. Yet, we do need to understand this word ‘environment’ is far more complex than we take it to be.

The reality of school, then, is that the quality of the performance a student gives in class assignments, homework, tests and examinations only shows how they have been coached by domestic, social and educational factors to present their mind the way they do. It has nothing to do with their intelligence.

School, however, does not wish to see it this way, because school is still the processing system it was designed to be over 150 years ago where it was required to create two qualities of citizen: The manager and the managed. Therefore, school uses the academic and social language skills of the parents to enable their child to relate to the world of school as it processes them, plus any purpose they may have to want to study, such as being a doctor or an astronaut, which itself is a social factor, and minus the stresses they incur through abuse and bullying that will hinder their ability to learn, which also has a socio-economic connotation.

To try to change this mindset of education and so better prepare the child of today for the world they must live and work in, and so create a new model citizen for this 21st Century, I have dedicated most of my adult life to study all associated fields of learning development, such as genetics, neurology, educational science, the political and social sciences and finally molecular technology (because a society designs its education on its technological level). I have written seven books on this subject, that are regarded by intellectuals and professors around the world to be some of the best books written on school, society and intelligence. Thus, it soon became very clear to me that while society informs its parent citizens that just as the police are provided for their protection, and doctors are provided for their better health, that teachers are provided to teach their children that there is a falseness in this. Because one teacher does not have the time, and very seldom the knowledge, to develop a clear understanding in the mind of each of their students in a class, the full worth of the lesson by which they will subsequently test and evaluate them upon.

In effect, it is to be realized that the teacher must rely upon the efficiency of the parents in the ways they prepared their child before they began school, and how they so control their time and energy while they develop through its many years. It is to be realized from this that the teacher is only a part of the academic development of the student, with the greater part often relying upon the academic and social skills of the parent, plus, most significantly, their nature in raising their child through a secure home environment where they sensitively explain to their child the world about them through very high language skills.

We hear today that Finnish education is the best in the world. The reality of the situation, is that the Finnish social system educates mothers to develop such high language skills in their children that, as students, they are better to adapt to and progress through the academic world. Their education merely builds upon this, and this emphasises what school is really about, Language and emotion.

Through my very long and dedicated research, study and work in these fields of intelligence and school, I propose a new understanding to replace that of the word “intelligence”. This is “The Brain Environment Complex”, because “The Brain Environment Complex” realizes that genetic diversity does not affect the ability of the normally born individual to freely develop their language skills and emotional state, upon which they develop and present the ability of their mind in education. Accordingly, this theory proposes that through general codes, we inherit certain schemas, such as that of imprinting, by which the individual is able to learn to interrogate, associate and relate to the world about them, and that emotional sensitivity in this is the key to understanding the level of proficiency in each of these aspects and so in the whole of the presentation they make to others, by which their competence is evaluated upon.

Thus, while the marks and grades given by education are said to demonstrate the ability of the student (the teacher provides information, the student demonstrates their understanding of this, to which the teacher marks the presentation of their effort), it has to be realized now that the student is only demonstrating their interpretation of the information provided by the teacher and not so their intelligence in how they respond. Such interpretation, as we have said, relies upon these two factors of their emotional content and their skill in language.

It is by their emotional state (the degree of their fascination, interest, disinterest, boredom or distraction) that they apply their energy to learn an efficiency with each subject matter. Equally, it is by their emotional state and through the quality and sensitivity by which they are raised and subsequently taught proficiency in the language they are educated in, and in that of mathematics (because all subjects such as history, geography, etc., and the sciences of chemistry, physics, etc., rely upon these two languages), that the student displays a presentation upon which education evaluates their worth.

Accordingly, with over 30 years of teaching and working with low performing students, as well as those said to be dyslexic and ADHD, I found that all were capable of very dramatically developing in their performance once, and often only once, their emotional state was better organized through the teacher’s love, patience, ability to inspire their self- belief and confidence, and then to correct and improve the student’s personal mis- understanding of their academic development.

Thus, it is not by their intelligence that the student develops through education and is eventually directed to the level of a work purpose, but by the long development of their emotional state to study and by their developed skill in the language by which they present their mind. This causes us to realize the profound need for parents and those soon to leave school as the parents to be, to be educated in awareness of this.

Once the parent is fully aware that school ability rests upon the emotional content and language skills of their child, and not so their supposed genetic ability, they are able to realize the full responsibility they have in the academic development of their child, just as the teacher, at any level of education, is able to adjust their method of interaction and teaching to dramatically improve the performance of each and all of the students in their classes. To so help teachers to explain information better and be more able to develop and improve the language skills of their students, I worked to design and create “The Andersen Attitude Method of Teaching.”

It may now be realized from all we have covered in this paper, that the continual failure of education to produce students better educated and more adaptable in their mental aptitude in the work they do, does lies in its adherence to the concept of intelligence being partly inborn or inherited, because this long gave school the excuse for an inefficient design that overworked its teachers and drained them of their good energy to maintain a processing of the human child to meet political agendas.

If those in education, and more so those in the politics behind education, now could realise the reasoning and sentiments expressed in this paper, then, school classes could be reduced in number to enable more students better interaction with their teachers, and for teachers to more have the ability to assist each student in their confusion and mis-understandings. Yet, far more than this, it would open the path for a subject in the syllabus to educate children in their reason that would arm them better for the world that awaits them after school.

As the 21st century progresses, our future generations will require skills of reason and flexibility in intelligence allied with social skills of patience, tolerance and empathy, that we now deprive them of, for the challenges that await them seeded in the development of technology and the social calamity that must evolve through the great displacement of peoples brought about through the effects of the climatic changes of global warming. Because global warming is a reality, just as is a technology that is developing that will not require human beings to administer “and control" their society.

 

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