Intellectual ambiguity. My husband and I lived in Nepal for a while. We bought our one-year-old daughter a toy with windows of different shapes, which she mastered very quickly. The same cannot be said for mature Nepalese farmers who stubbornly could not figure out what to do about it. Therefore, even then I had questions about measuring intelligence. Luria and Vygotsky studied people in the villages in 1931-1932 and compared them to literate people. The results of the study were kept secret because then they concluded that people without school education had low intelligence and were sure that school would make everyone smart in the future, but in the present there was no need to harm anyone. But there are, as always, nuances. And they are interesting. Let's look at the details, what did you test it with?
1. Fourth wheel: axe, knife, log, hammer The "illiterates" did not want to behave like the "knowers" and cross the "diary" off the list. "So what's the point of an ax without a log? "They returned obstinately, and inspired an intelligent arrogance. Those of the illiterates who finally arrived in Soviet schools deleted the diary "correctly". 2. A syllogism was offered: "There are polar bears at the North Pole. A new land in the North Pole. What kind of bears are there in Novaya Zemlya? The "illiterates" answered that they were not there and did not know, they could only talk about those brown bears they had seen in person. Those who went to school immediately answered that bears are naturally white. Thus they began to distinguish between primitive concrete thinking and developed abstract thinking. In 1974, the study was canceled and Luria's students (mostly foreigners) conducted similar studies on other natives. "A knife without an orange is useless," the latter stubbornly insisted, driving intelligent researchers to despair.
Finally, the researcher asked the question: "What would a stupid person do? " "Well, a stupid person will naturally separate the dishes from the log (the knife from the orange). ” Then there was a revolution in consciousness and scientists guessed about the interesting phenomenon of applied abstraction.