CDXXXIV – Were The Genuis’s At

I saw a conversation, also on substack, that asked the question, “How do we cultivate Genius?”

This question has two parts. Part one is cultivation, what does that look like. Part two is Genius. What crop are we even trying to cultivate?

The conversation was by the same people who had the Utopia discussion so they can’t see their faulty assumptions. My guess if the conversation goes on for a long time that they would settle on a definition of Genius that means “very smart big brain people like us” and a mechanism of cultivation that looks very much like antiseptic bureaucratic tyranny.

All that I’ve told you so far is what I think about what I think they would say, and not what they have actually said, nor what I actually think about what they actually said. That’s because I’m a judgmental person as increasingly apparent by my writing. It wasn’t the content that intrigued me, but the question. How do we cultivate Genius? That’s what the rest of this article will focus on.

Genius I do not accept means big-brain-smarty-pants. A musical genius is a person who is talented at arranging music in a way that is beautiful and moving. A literary genius is someone who can write beautiful and evocative prose. Genius then means extraordinary talent. My personal belief is that everyone has the capacity for extraordinary talent in some field or other, but we use the word Genius to mark the best of the best. A society filled with geniuses would cease to consider themselves geniuses and only the best of the best of them would be extraordinary and so considered geniuses.

So if we accept that Genius is another way of saying extraordinary talent, then the only question remaining to us is cultivation. Thinking about genius naturally lends itself to thinking about the education system, and that is partly the right answer. It should be thinking about the vocation system, which for some means education. Industrial education has ruined society, forcing oddly shaped human pegs into uniformly round holes. Some people just don’t fit. True geniuses–people with an innate, natural talent in some aspect of things–become either depressed or suppressed, and the only kinds of geniuses we get are the kinds that are extraordinarily talented at navigating the academic system. Genius can fall into any category in any endeavor, which is why a vocation system is very important.

I wrote about this–without calling it vocation system–in my previous article on Scootland, which you can find here. In the article, I give responsibility for baseline education to the Church, and then make a proposal for advanced studies:

Advanced studies would take three different tracks: Professional/Vocational schools, Seminaries, and Philosophical universities. Professional/Vocational schools would train students for work in a trade, in a profession, in a service, whichever. I went to school for Accounting, I would have gone to a professional school for accounting. Seminaries obviously would train both Priests and teachers. Philosophical universities would be for the truly advanced and learned men and women who are studying and advancing the search for truth.

The idea here is that if you are a young Scoot and you find you have a talent for numbers and spreadsheets, you don’t need to waste your time learning Spanish or reading Dostoevsky; you should receive training to make you a good accountant. (Exposure to Spanish or Dostoevsky should happen in that basic education, as well as exposure to numbers and spreadsheets.) Creativity comes from connecting unrelated fields, but free learning should be a private endeavor. If young Scoot finds himself interested in languages, then he should go to the library in his spare time and study languages. Lots of resources should be available to encourage private study. Mentorships, internships, apprenticeships, should all be available to help young Scoot learn more from people than books, so that his knowledge is not confined merely to Accounting.

The idea is that talents should be identified early so that later work can allow one to focus on that talent and bringing out it’s full potential. This is NOT exclusive of other areas of learning, just aimed at drawing out natural talents.

So “cultivation” here means identifying talents and giving young people the resources and training to grow those talents. The identification of talents is up to parents and teachers and other wise older people around; the desire to pursue the training has to come from the student.

This idea is not without flaws–I welcome constructive critique! Let me know what you think.

AMDG