Charles Schnabolk, the president (and a founding member) of the New Jersey Chapter of the National Association of the Lower Half, says he's tired of hearing sneers at people who graduated in the lower half of their class. Schnabolk, whose spirited defense ofbottom-halfers appeared in the New York Times (January 8, 1989) and was reprinted in Bottom Line magazine (March 15, 1989) is especially indignant about the treatment that bottom-halfer Dan Quayle has gotten. But as Schnabolk points out, the problem is much bigger than insults to the vice-president - people who graduated in the lower half of their class make up 50 percent of the population. And they have some of the biggest jobs in the country.
According to Schnabolk' s "informal statistics," graduates of the upper half monopolize the "dull jobs" - like college teaching, orthodontia, polymer physics and one-dimensional computer programming." But "lowerhalf individuals concentrate on the more glamorous occupations like vice-president of the United States." As a matter of fact, Schnabolk' s figures say that most of our presidents ( more than 7 5 percent) and most senators (more than 65 percent), as well as leaders of the Fortune 500 companies, come from the bottom half: "Membership in Phi Beta Kappa is not a prerequisite to enable someone to balance the budget."
On the other hand, taking grades seriously enough to get A's might show a poor sense of proportion and could be dangerous. If you can get a C by spending four hours or so in the course of a semester, Schnabolk reasons, why spend 200 hours to get an A? "Simple mathematics indicates that four hours for a C is a greater intellectual accomplishment than spending 200 hours to get that usually meaningless A."
And going after grades might be a handicap to a person later in life: "The person who considers final grades as a low priority is better able to compete in life. That's why the CEOs of the largest corporations are graduates from the lower half, and almost all the corporate raiders and the majority of stockbrokers making over a million dollars a year were from the lower half of the class." And that's why the people who decide which upper-half kids will get into college are lower-halfers themselves ("60 percent of all admission directors were in the lower half of their class").
Is Schnabolk kidding us with his statistics? Sure. Did this champion of the bottom half really graduate last in his class at Stevens Institute, as his bio says? And last in his graduate school class at NYU? Has NALH, as I suppose the National Association for the Lower Half would be known to its friends, really been around for 30 years? Probably not. The point is that Schnabolk is revisiting a subject we're all familiar with - the phenomenon of the successful person who was a failure in school. Or at least who didn't give much hint of future greatness.
Winston Churchill, Thomas Alva Edison, Albert Einstein, Eugene O'Neill, George Gershwin - everybody could add some names to the list. There is something very appealing about the story of a failure or noaccount in school who becomes a dazzling success. It reminds us of fairy tale endings, and it's one in the eye of authority. But how can we explain these transformations? Why is there so little correlation between the grades people get in school and their accomplishments in life? Modern cognitive psychology has some answers to these questions.
Robert Sternberg, a professor of psychology at Yale, distinguishes between three aspects of intelligence in his book The Triarchic Mind: (1) analytic - this makes you good at grasping and retaining material and at critical thinking; (2) synthetic - the usual name for this is creativity; it gives you the power to come up with new ideas, new solutions to a problem; and (3) practical - this corresponds to street smarts, a political sense, the ability to put an idea into practice.
Think about school in this context and you'll see that it's set up almost entirely to encourage the first aspect of intelligence. In school, we learn to manipulate symbols, and we begin to learn the body of knowledge that our culture considers important. These things are very important. No question about it. But the other two aspects of intelligence are ignored -- and even discouraged.
What happens to the kid who asks the unexpected question -- the one that will never be on any test because there isn't any simple answer, or any answer? In most situations, the best that kid can hope for is to be ignored, but he might be humiliated and called a troublemaker. In either case, he will soon learn -- as will the perceptive kids around him - to curb his imagination when he's in class.
If the creative child is likely to be threatening, the child with the practical intelligence might just go unnoticed - that is, until she grows up to run her own business and become the kind of success her Ph.D. brother wonders at.
What we teach in school is too narrow. And in limiting what we teach largely to the analytic aspect of intelligence, we cheat all children. Kids who are strong in the synthetic or practical sides of intelligence often learn to think of themselves as stupid - and they tune out. School does not contribute to their growth. But the arrangement doesn't work well for kids who are strong in the analytic side of intelligence, either. They don't find out about the limitations of book learning, and they don't get the encouragement they need to develop other kinds of smarts.
Charles Schnabolk's picture of the lively and successful bottom-halfers - playing golf, making money, wielding political power - and the rather dull upper-halfers who go from making A's to making polymers is a