Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google by Ian Gilbert

‘nature v nurture’ debate had quietened down along comes the concept of epigenetic theory and it kicks off again. Epigenetics is all to do with the way genes can be reprogrammed by cultural, maternal and environmental influences and, although you, as a teacher, may have no input with regard to the ‘nature’ element of the equation, you need to be aware of the effects of ‘nurture’. Not least because your actions actually change the very nature of the DNA of the children in your care.
    The truce between those expressing the view that our genes determine who we are more than our environment and those declaring, on the contrary, that it is our environment that moulds us into who we become, overriding our genes, the naturists versus the nurturists, was best summed up by science writer Matt Ridley when he wrote:
    No longer is it nature-versus-nurture, but nature-via-nurture.
    (Ridley 2003)
    To look at this properly we need to go back to the whole question of the very nature of intelligence, not IQ this time but the related concept of ‘g’. In a nutshell, ‘g’, 1 which stands for ‘general intelligence’ and was coined by statistician Charles Spearman who was a follower of the Francis Galton, we met in chapter six and a ‘fervent champion of heredity’ in Ridley’s words, is a way of summing up that special ingredient that is common to all the various intelligence tests. In other words, that special ingredient possessed by the child who seems to do well no matter what you throw at them.
    What’s more, there is something called the Flynn Effect 2 these days that shows that IQ scores have actually been rising significantly across the world. And no-one really knows why. Is it diet? Is it the increasingly enriched environments children are living in with access to various forms of media? Is it more experience in dealing with the sorts of questions andthe sort of questioning techniques the tests use? And before you declare that it must be schooling, the sorts of 3-Rs type learning to be found in schools have not shown any significant increase and have even shown declines. What’s more, the biggest gains have taken place at the lower end of the intelligence scale with the higher end remaining pretty much the same. In other words, all over the world stupid people are becoming cleverer. (Although, in the UK, this growth in intelligence of young people peaked in the 1980s and has held steady since then. I don’t know about you but I get a warm glow from being part of such a peak.) What’s more, if you extrapolate backwards, according to controversial professor Arthur Jensen, 3 Aristotle would have an IQ of -1000.
    So, here, as we have seen elsewhere, the whole idea of measuring intelligence in a meaningful way is a very tangled web. That said, it still seems to be the most consistent way of roughly saying – this child is ‘intelligent’. Which brings us back to genes. No-one has yet discovered an ‘intelligence gene’ (although Ridley does point out that one gene that does seem to play a part in IQ contains a repeating code that always begins with the amino acids isoleucine and glutamine or, to give them their standard abbreviation, IQ). But there do appear to be genetic factors at play. For example, there is a correlation between brain volume and IQ of around 40 per cent. Having a big brain doesn’t guarantee you are a genius but it starts to tip things in your favour. Yet environment still plays a part with studies of twins showing it to be around the nice and non-confrontational 50–50 mark. But there are other factors at play too, as research shows that how well you inherit your parents’ IQ depends on your socio-economic status too. If you’re middle class or well off, your environment doesn’t make much difference to the brainpower you were born with. If you’re poor, that poverty outweighs practically any of the IQ-related potential you were born with.
    Think about the implications of that at a