If school sucked for you, maybe you're a . . .

deep soul

Fort Sheridan Prairie, Illinois - by Kathryn Haydon

Why world-changers may be misunderstood in school

In a prior article, I wrote about the grade school challenges of one of the world’s most prolific inventors: Thomas Edison. His main “issue” was that he asked too many questions, suggesting to his rigid teacher that he was mentally challenged. (Read the article here.)

In asking questions, Edison was actually expressing the deep soul strengths of knowledge-questing and deep diving. He was insatiably curious. He wanted to know much more about the topics being taught than was required.

I’ll recap here that to understand Edison’s plight—and the struggle of millions of others—we need to examine one of the most pervasive fallacies that we as a society take to be fact: you are intelligent in proportion to your achievement in school.

This is the fallacy on which much of our society is based:

If you are a high achiever in school, you must be smart. 

This statement in and of itself isn’t the main problem. Many high achievers, of course, are highly intelligent. However, it is the necessary inverse of this statement that has ruined the hope of many lives:

If you do not do well in school or if it is a struggle or you simply can’t see the value in it, you are of below average intelligence. 

Even worse is what follows:

If you do not do well in school, something must be wrong with you. 

This is especially difficult for students whose parents or teachers do believe they have “something” because they see their wit, humor, imagination, perceptivity, problem solving, or invention/building abilities in other contexts. Such observations often intensify the last statement, emphasizing the fallacy:

You are obviously smart but your school performance doesn’t show it so there must be something wrong with you. 

This logic is erroneous.