What does it mean to be smart!?

"Our system of education is, to a large degree, a closed system. Students are tested and classified in terms of two kinds of abilities—their ability to memorize information and, to a lesser extent, their ability to analyze it...

Students may, however, excel in other abilities that are at least as important as those we now reward. Creativity and the practical application of information—ordinary common sense or "street smarts"—are two such abilities that go unappreciated and unrecognized. They are simply not considered relevant to conventional education...

The consequences of this system are potentially devastating. Through grades and test scores, we may be rewarding only a fraction of the students who should be rewarded. Worse, we may be inadvertently disenfranchising multitudes of students from learning.

In fact, when researchers have examined the lives of enormously influential people, whether in creative domains (Gardner 1993), practical domains (Gardner 1995), or both, they have found that many of these people had been ordinary—or even mediocre—students..."

~Robert J. Sternberg

Source: "What Does It Mean to Be Smart?", Robert J. Sternberg, Educational Leadership March 1997 | Volume 54 | Number 6 How Children Learn Pages 20-24