If School Sucked for You, Maybe You’re a Deep Soul

By Kathryn P. Haydon

Deep Souls, Grow Your Creativity

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.

The genius of the prairie

An accurate assessment of intelligence cannot be based on school or test performance, either positive or negative. I write this as a former straight-A student. In order to attain this grade record, I later learned, I had to severely constrain my deep soul strengths. Over the past couple of decades, I have worked hard to nurture them back into existence. (More on that in a future article!)

When we call someone “intelligent” or “a genius” through the lens of the prevailing paradigm, the term is comparative and implies ranking on the basis of test scores or grades. Comparing and ranking people on one dimension is counterproductive. However, empirical research, case studies, and even common sense all back a compelling argument that it is often the actual genius part of people that rubs up against school.

The very traits that don’t match up with school underlie the most advanced cognitive function—creative thinking. The seven deep soul strengths are building blocks of creative thinking. When we can identify our deep soul strengths as the genius part of us, we can accept them as our primary identity and activate them.

But we often have to do this in spite of our education system which is set up on the basis of a ranking approach that is antithetical to the truth that human intelligence is multi-dimensional and infinitely varied.

People simply can’t be compared to each other like apples.

The landscape of human intelligence is like a robust, flowing prairie. 

Prairies are lush with hundreds of diverse species, all contributing uniquely to the landscape and to the overall ecosystem. Each species has functions, aesthetics, and details that make it unique and useful. Prairies are strong ecosystems that thrive because they leverage the strengths of each participant. If a plant or animal has a weakness, it doesn’t matter in the prairie context because the strength of another species fills in for it. Prairies of The Great Plains thrived under this functioning for thousands of years without major human interference.

Yet what if a scientist had invented a new method to measure prairie grass heights and it had become the standard for evaluating prairies?

What would have happened if achieving grass tallness were the “proven” metric to determine prairie health?

The taller the grasses within it, the healthier and more valuable the prairie. The prairie with the most tall grasses wins.

Prairie conservationists would adopt a singular focus to make grasses tall. They would feed them pesticides and proteins. They’d prevent naturally regenerative prairie fires because burning would set them back on measurement day. They might even yank shorter grasses from the land because short grass would bring down the overall score.

If we were to value and categorize the prairie on one dimension like this, all of a sudden little else about the prairie would factor into our consideration. The growth possibility of the entire ecosystem would be severely limited. The important function of the hundreds of species besides grasses would become afterthoughts at best.  Eventually the system might become unrecognizable or die off with such a misguided approach.

Our standardized and IQ-based ranking system has had a similar effect on learning. 

Someone invented the tests, they became the main focus, and industries (including the education system itself) built up around them. But the practice was proven flawed from the beginning. Even worse, it has made many people who don’t fit the narrow norms on narrow measures think they are flawed.

When prairie grasses take root they grow downward first, some species for seven years. To the measurement specialists such grasses would seem worthless without height above the soil. But in actuality, these plants are indispensable because their deep roots help the entire ecosystem stand up to harsh winds and even tornadoes.

On our society’s narrow ranking system, you may rank high or you may rank low. Think of it for a moment as prairie grass measurement. Measuring grass height might show some interesting patterns and yield insights for scientists. But considering the vast multidimensionality of prairies, the focus on a single measure would cause more harm than good for prairies whose grasses aren’t the tallest, and for species that are ignored under this approach.

Realizing that standardized tests and grades are limited measures of intelligence may sting the egos of those who have high scores, or give a little boost to those who have lower scores. But these are not the focus of our conversation. Nor is the focus on any disability or other label we may have picked up along the way.

Deep Soul Strengths challenges us to get to the core of who we are. Because wherever we fit on the bell curve, it is highly likely that the creative thinking part of us got us in trouble or made us dissatisfied with school. Creativity is the genius part of every one of us and it deserves deep and detailed consideration. Deep soul strengths are the basis of creativity. They are secret superpowers that we may not even know we possess, because they are so often misunderstood. 

One of the most famous statesmen in recent history provides a case study, which we will examine in this next article . . .

This post originally appeared on Kathryn Haydon’s Deep Soul Strengths publication here.