Education As the Cultivation of Intelligence
Routledge – 2000
Series: Educational Psychology Series
Martinez defines intelligence from a cognitive perspective as a repertoire of those skills, strategies, and knowledge structures that are most instrumental in human effectiveness. He posits that in today's complex, fast-paced, technologically dense, and information-rich society, intelligence is the supreme human resource. The current social context not only demands intelligence, but rewards it economically, psychically, and in other ways. His central argument in this book is this: The intellectual abilities that are crucial to modern life, including economic viability and effectiveness in daily living, correspond to the cognitive functions that are reasonably called intelligence; these intellectual abilities are learnable; we now know enough about the structure and mechanisms of intelligent thought and behavior to teach them directly. Martinez explicates his argument and provides research-based evidence to support his claim.
Contents: Preface. Part I: Introduction. The Age of Intelligence. Part II: What Is Intelligence? Psychometric Models. Information-Processing Models. Emergent Models. A Model of Learnable Intelligence. Part III: Can Intelligence Be Learned? Genetics and the Plasticity of Intelligence. The Race Question. Intelligence and Experience. Interventions That Enhance Intelligence. Part IV: Learnable Intelligence and Society. Cultivating Intelligence. Prospects for an Intelligent World.