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If the brain is always growing and developing, how can we measure intelligence on a single test? And are there ways in which our intelligence is affected by our DNA, our genes, and our environment?
Joining me today to talk about the genetics behind our intelligence and what the research says about what standardized testing is actually measuring is the author of Rethinking Intelligence, Dr. Rina Bliss.
We’ll discuss how and why we measure intelligence in our society and offer parents suggestions for what they can do to support their children as they navigate the education system today.
Dr. Rina (00:00):
The complicated yet simple message that we’ve learned from studying DNA for the last 50 years, right? It’s just that you have basically what you need. It’s just do you have what you need in your environment outside of your body to help your body to live out its potential?
Dr. Sarah (00:28):
What does it mean to be intelligent on a genetic level? The answer may surprise you, and that is what this week’s guest is here to discuss. Dr. Rina Bliss is a professor of sociology at Rutgers University who spent more than a decade researching misconceptions about the nature of intelligence. And her new book, Rethinking Intelligence: A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential comes out today. We are going to be busting some misconceptions around IQ, standardized testing, and we’re going to offer some solutions and suggestions for how parents can navigate the traditional education system that may or may not be supporting each unique child’s needs.
(01:06):
Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.
(01:38):
Hello everybody. Welcome. Today we have an amazing guest, Dr. Rina Bliss is here to talk to us all about intelligence, the mind, our genetics, and I’m so excited for this conversation. Thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Rina (01:57):
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Dr. Sarah (02:00):
Yeah. So you just came out with this new book, Rethinking Intelligence. You are, you’ve done tons of research on DNA genetics. I’m so curious, what made you think to write this book? Why is this so interesting and what’s the story?
Dr. Rina (02:24):
Well, I, I’ve been doing research into the social implications of DNA for quite some time, and I actually began studying kind of the relationship between our d n and our concepts of human variation, human diversity, and on a collective level, what people say in the general culture, but also how that was affecting how people saw themselves and thought about themselves and talked about themselves and family, ancestry, all of that. So I had been studying that and I noticed that there was this genomic kind of science rising up to get involved in this debate about how different are we, are we really that different? And so I found that there were a lot of scientists who are pushing back Abe against the notion of racial differences. And so there were a lot of scientists who wanted to use their science to prove that these were really bad narratives and that we needed to change the narratives.
(03:36):
And it was a really cool thing to see all of these people mapping the human genome and all this excitement around kind of the early two thousands around kind of dispelling these myths about fundamental differences and superiority and inferiority. But then at the same time, a lot of the scientists who are leading the charge were turning towards studying the relationship between genes and environments. And that was really fuzzy. That was something that people were having trouble making sense of, even the geneticists themselves. And so one of the things that I saw happening was there was a new kind of movement within genetics to study behavior, but not just behavior in general, but specific things, how far you got in school, whether you ended up committing crimes and going to prison. Also, things like whether you were a liberal or a conservative, and it were so interesting.
(04:52):
And all of these really interesting social behaviors were coming kind of under the microscope. And so one of the things that people were also studying and trying to figure out if there’s a genetic kind of component to it and what the genes associated with said behavior, it was IQ. So intelligence, IQ, and it’s actually been a really big area of research now that it’s developed into this really big area of research within that kind of subfield of genetics that looks at behavior. So I was interested in it from a scientific standpoint, but also because I personally felt and feel that I have had negative experiences with intelligence testing, and I’ve been one of these people who’s kind of been moved through a system that has really valued aptitude testing, standardized testing, and has only increasingly so been featuring these kinds of intelligence tests and very limited and narrow definitions of intelligence at the center of education, at the center of our academic experiences. And so I, from a personal standpoint, was also interested in what are we about to tell ourselves about our potential? What are we about to tell ourselves? What are we going to learn once we get all of this kind of genetics of IQ and intelligence come percolating up to the surface? Right.
Dr. Sarah (06:50):
Yeah, that’s so interesting. I think that for me, I’m been a student most of my life. I’ve been to all through primary high school, college, my doctorate program. I’ve been taking tests and being measured by tests my whole life. And I am now as a mom looking at my own children and what their future looks like in the academic world. And I’m a little disillusioned by the over-emphasis on tests. Even as someone who I did neuropsychological assessment for a long time and administered these IQ tests and these achievement tests, and they’re still very valuable. We need them. We use them diagnostically, even in psychology a lot. But it’s got to be more context. There’s got to be, I’m so curious what you found.
Dr. Rina (07:48):
Yeah. Well, one of the things that I found was that intelligence, there’s really a dogma around intelligence out there, and the dogma unfortunately permeates science with a big capital S. So most areas of science that study intelligence including genetics, any genetics of intelligence kind of sees intelligence as something that can be scored. It’s a limited amount. It’s something that you can know through an IQ test. Typically, that’s like the way that we figure out what somebody’s score is through an IQ test or some other kind of similar intelligence test that people fall somewhere along a curve. And that means that we’re always ranking ourselves and comparing ourselves. So that’s a built in assumption and assumption of the dogma and that it’s based on your genetics somewhere in there. It’s based on your genetic endowment, whether you won the lottery or you lost the lottery that your test scores will show.
(09:08):
And so there are a lot of intel intelligent scientists who have pushed back against this. Of course, there are people who talk about multiple intelligences. There are people who talk about emotional intelligence. There are people who talk about all these other kinds of intelligence that are equally, if not more important than intellectual intelligence. But still, when we are talking about how you assess or ascertain how intelligent somebody is, we still use IQ tests or intelligence tests that have this kind of built in assumption of that we need to compare ourselves to each other and we need to rank ourselves according to where we fall on that curve.
Dr. Sarah (09:59):
And it, it’s so interesting because I’m imagining that, you know, could speak to this probably better than I can, but this idea of, there’s obviously some combination, right? I would imagine there’s some genetic pre-determination, some certain facts that are going to determine executive functioning capacity, like our prefrontal cortex, what kind of even our nervous system, which is genetically kind of predicted in some ways. If you have a very sensitive nervous system and you go into a threat response more easily, temperaments, all these things can impact how we perform on a test. But does that mean that that test is capturing what it’s saying it captures.
Dr. Rina (10:45):
And I mean, the thing is that they’re genetics are very simple and complicated at the same time. Simple in the sense that our genomes give us the basic architecture of our minds, our neural architecture. And so they give us this capacity to think, to learn, to get, gather information, to form memories, to be able to access the memories, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. For most people, you are basically driven by the principle of neuroplasticity, neuroplasticity being that your brains are constantly forming neural networks, reworking those networks, using what you need from them and pruning them back when you are learning something different and need a different set of resources from your brain. And so essentially, we’re always growing, we’re always developing, we’re always changing. So for most people, this is how it works regardless of how high you score on a test. And so the other thing is that the other simple thing is that our genomes code for proteins, but they are regulated by the epigenome and the epigenomes.
(12:17):
This is where it gets more complicated, but in a sense it is pretty simple as well. The epigenomes basically tell your genome and tell those genes whether to express themselves, whether to turn on or turn off. Most of the time when you have these modifications, when you look at these modifications, you see that the epigenomes often have a negative effect by silencing genes. So you could be born with this genome that is supposedly going to give you the potential to do all of the things you need to do with your body and your mind. And then you’re, because of the epigenome, your genes that you need to be on are off, and you are therefore not thriving, you’re just surviving. We inherit these modifications from our ancestors and our parents, essentially our parents, our parents, parents, et cetera. But they are constantly responding to and changing within us in our lifetimes due to our social environmental inputs.
(13:38):
So a lot of people when they talk about epigenomes, they don’t talk about intellect, they don’t talk about intelligence, they don’t talk about the mind as much. They talk about things like food, quality of air, quality of water, sleep, these kinds of things that are just your most basic biological needs. But one of the burgeoning areas of epigenomics, which is the study of this part of your genetics and your inheritance and what you pass down to your kids, et cetera, is stress. So stress is a huge factor on your epigenome. So it has a very big impact on whether you are having those genes you need to be on or whether they’re in fact being silenced and they’re turned off. So that’s kind of the complicated yet simple message that we’ve learned from studying DNA for the last 50 years. Right. It’s just that you have basically what you need. It’s do you have what you need in your environment outside of your body to help your body to live out its potential? Right.
Dr. Sarah (15:07):
That’s really, that’s so interesting. And from what I, I’m trying to think if I’m a listener and I’m not versed in all of these scientific terms, and I imagine this could feel heavy and dense and confusing. And I’m trying to think of a way to make it a really simple illustration of this, and I could be totally wrong, so tell me if I’m getting this right. But in psychology, the way we often think about it is I might be genetically predispositioned to anxiety because my parent has an anxiety disorder and their parent perhaps had an anxiety disorder. So I carry this sort of genetic predis preloading to feel anxiety, and maybe that means that manifests in I have at birth, my temperament was more I was slow to warm up, or I was very overstimulated easily in environmental, stimulii activated my nervous system more. But as I get older, whether or not I actually have an anxiety disorder, I might be pre deter. I might have a genetic preloading to have an anxiety disorder so that gene could be turned on by perhaps my epigenome.
Dr. Rina (16:27):
Yes. So it’s never as simple as one gene does everything for you and codes. Codes basically makes you have a disorder. But yeah, so you’re based on the inputs from your environment, meaning how your parents treated you or your caregivers, whoever was taking care of you, and the environments, the social environments, how healthy they were. Also those other things I mentioned sleep and nutrition and all of movement exercise, all of that. But really how cared for you were tailored to what you needed, how quality was that care
Dr. Sarah (17:12):
So attuned that attunement, the ability of the, not that the caregiver, but the whole environment to be at attuned to your needs.
Dr. Rina (17:18):
The whole environment to be attuned. And so that brings us back to this issue of testing in schools, which is very just standardized. And so what happens is you have these tests that are supposed to be telling you, this is just how smart you are. This is a number, we’ve put a number score on you. And the scores unfortunately are used to not just to say is how smart you seem today based on what you knew so far, but it’s actually somewhat predictive. It’s like how smart do we think this person is be because we’re going to track them for some kind of education or special learning. Or they might, in the sense of public schools in America, they might get put into a gifted and talented education or GATE program, a gifted program. They might go to a magnet school, they might go to, or they might be taken into special needs, special education programs or classrooms, or they might be taken to out of the school completely and put into an alternative school.
(18:35):
And so the standardized test issue is just that we have these environments that are bearing down on our kids and telling our kids, we’re just going to slap this curriculum on you that is going to prepare you for these tests, and then the tests are going to tell us whether we should keep promoting your education in this way or kind of scale it back and put you into this other kind of grouping. And really what we need is an environment, a classroom environment, and a social environment that promotes that child’s individual needs that’s helping with that tailoring process we were just talking about.
Dr. Sarah (19:22):
Right. And it’s a kind of a catch 22 because the way that we are trying to measure what an individual child needs sounds like it might be actually a bit flawed in and of itself, which then kind of muddies the whole picture. So if I have a kid who, and again, I want to be very clear to parents, there’s no problem getting your child assessed, right? It’s important. I am a huge proponent of early intervention and getting assessments done. Obviously from a diagnostic standpoint, when we’re looking at do we need to get services? Is there a learning disability? Are there ways that this brain might be, we want to know that stuff. And we definitely use IQ testing as part of that assessment process. So the data’s important, but at least, and I imagine any good neuropsych, I’m not a neuropsychologist, but any good neuropsychologist is going to say that’s one piece of a much more complex picture. And we can’t extrapolate any one conclusion from just the IQ test.
(20:19):
But the problem I find is in the academic systems, we are using these tests to determine, you’re saying achievement class access program access, whether or not kids are getting into college, whether or not they’re getting into certain gifted or talented programs or perhaps special learning. So I think it’s like it’s a complex system because it’s like we need these assessments to be able to, we don’t have any other way of painting the picture right now, but if not used in the context of a much broader, more dynamic like collection of information, like you said, what is their social functioning? What is their emotional resilience? What is their ability to keep going when things are difficult? There are just so many other factors and I’m sure matter and may or may not be being considered for certain types of applications of these tasks.
Dr. Rina (21:25):
And another thing that studying epigenomics and just genetics in general has shown us is that what I was saying before about stress, that the weight of stress on ourselves, but especially on little minds, on little minds and bodies, is serious, seriously an issue for us and for them. And so we beyond thinking, okay, in certain circumstances we might need to pull this test out of our arsenal and apply it to this one person. There are ways to actually use tests that are one-on-one, and we’re not talking sitting everyone down at the beginning and ending of the year of the school year and se giving everyone the same test. We’re talking about something with a psychologist. And so that, that’s one use of tests. The whole culture of the public school classroom is geared towards eventually teaching them for these tests, teaching to the tests. And the stress of the test taking season is so bad for the whole school, and that’s just standardized aptitude tests that aren’t even necessarily predictive, but they are still also used for tracking, which is disturbing.
Dr. Sarah (23:12):
And I think it speaks kind of to a systemic problem. I’m curious your take on the, so the social construct of this piece, which is we as a society, and I think these roots go back to, oh, they go way back, but I think at least to the industrial revolution, but probably further, but this idea of in the industrial revolution, there was this huge need for workers, for factory workers, for laborers, for people who could be cogs in a machine and help man manpower this industrial revolution. And the school systems to my understanding, were developed to create a structure that would produce a lot of these types of workers. So it was a lot of following instruction, staying in line, following the protocols, not really stepping outside, not creative thinking, not questioning, not, it wasn’t really about how do we foster the most creative and intellectual minds.
(24:15):
We were like, how do we get people who will follow instructions and learn tasks? And that kind of is the birth of our modern education system. And now in 2023, it has not changed that much, which is super problematic. I know I’m on a soapbox, but this is something that drives me bonkers. And I think that throughout all this time, the internalization in our society of valuing product, valuing achievement, valuing grades, valuing scores, and using those outcomes as a pathway to success and access is, it’s so backwards because the reality is we have a bunch of people who really, whether you think that way, mean whether that work that system works for your particular brain is not guaranteed. So there are people who have brains that don’t work in a system like that, and we pathologize that, but rea in reality, it’s like, well, if we kind of tailored the academic environment to meet the needs of everyone’s individual strengths and skills and the way their brains worked and followed their interests, what could we build? And I think I’m disillusioned by the school system that we have today, and I do think it’s a product of this internalized obsession with achievement. The whole kindergarten is the new first grade where I hate that. Why would we want our five-year-old sitting in desks and doing worksheets? That’s not the way that the five-year-old brain learns.
Dr. Rina (26:01):
Yes, I, exactly. There’s, so this idea of divergence is completely contradictory to the reality of neuroplasticity. I know that they don’t sound like opposite things, and they’re not quite opposite, but they contradict each other because you are either always changing and growing or you’re just a fixed thing, a test score. And if you are just a fixed thing, then you’re somewhere on that curve. The whole disturbing history of the tests themselves, I don’t know how much people know about this, but IQ tests were actually, the whole idea of an intelligence test was created by people who were part of the, and who were leading the eugenics movement, which was a movement back in the early part of the 20th century, late part of the 19th century, but really got going in America in the 20th century. And that movement was a combination of people working in science and in politics and leadership.
(27:19):
So meaning there were people who were famous scientists, people like Charles Darwin, Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, the whole movement, it was a movement over several decades, but the whole movement was dedicated to assessing and identifying and naming and branding those who are supposedly inferior, genetically inferior. And in IQ tests were used for this. And then in the case of the US sterilizing, incarcerating, and in some cases exterminating, and in the case of Germany and other parts of Europe exterminating, right? Yes. And so it’s a terrible, terrible even term, but it’s the reality. It was genocide. It was a tool. The IQ tests or the intelligence tests, which later became IQ tests and then or were replaced by IQ tests, and then the IQ tests themselves thereafter were used by people who are part of this eugenics movement to identify people to commit these horrible crimes of humanity against, right?
(28:48):
And so that’s the history of the tests. Now, fast forward to today, and the tests measure something very important that people also might or might not know out there, which is that they measure social privilege. So they are a really great way to find out how educated your parents were, how educated their parents were, how wealthy they were, socioeconomic status, their race, their gender, all of these aspects of social privilege that are huge kind of ax axis of inequality in the United States presently, all of those kind of inequalities come up in and are reflected by the curve and the test scores. So in a sense, IQ tests are, and intelligence tests are very, very good at measuring social privilege. And so we have to ask ourselves, is that what we want to be giving to our kids? Do we want to be giving them these tests that are not just identifying people who are more privileged, but they’re also identifying people who are more privileged and then tracking them for a better future? That kind of application towards tracking and towards, and again, this is that kind of way of taking kids aptitude tests and then branding them and saying, you are probably going to do better and you probably need advanced education. So we’re going to get you started on that now.
Dr. Sarah (30:45):
Right, and I think this goes back to what we were saying before of what exactly are these tests actually measuring and how do we use it as a tool today that may be different from how it was originated? Because the reality is a tool is a tool. If you create a hammer to bludgeon someone and you use it to bludgeon someone, that’s a problem. But if you take that hammer and you say, oh my God, I can bang a nail into this, I could build an entire house. The tool itself, the hammer then can become something very useful and very effective at creating. Good. So what I’m really curious, we live in this system. We use standardized tests for everything. They have a really complicated and terrible history, and they can be used as a tool to continue to diminish diversity, diminish access to services and access to resources to separate and segment people, or they can be used as a tool to be probably, in my opinion, necessarily part of a much more complex system of measurement.
(31:53):
But we use them. Our kids are stuck in this system right now until we can revamp and revitalize the American public education system. Until we can do that one, I suppose, on a more, on a policy level in this res, the people making the decisions, how do we structurally change that? But then also as parents, as someone who just, I send my kid to public school, they have their regents exams, they have their to aptitude tests. I know my teachers, my kids’ teachers are under tremendous pressure to teach to the tests and not to necessarily create a learning environment that meets the needs of the classroom. And that fosters a love of learning and creative thought and intrinsic motivation. This is the reality. What do we do as parents inside of it to make the most of the situation and to support our children’s education inside the classroom, but perhaps also outside of the classroom. And then perhaps my follow-up question is more systemically as the researchers, as the clinicians, as the people creating these tests and administering these tests, what can we do to shift this as well?
Dr. Rina (33:06):
Yeah, I think that the first thing is as parents, my husband and I are making the same decisions now because our kids will be slated for testing in the next couple of years. And so I personally am going to have my kids abstain from testing, and you can do that now, which is something that you couldn’t do before. So I think that that’s one thing that I personally am going to do. Everybody is going to have their own way of dealing with test taking time and testing season. But as parents, we also have to be ready to advocate for our kids and to step in there and say, if we get this sense that our kids are being negatively affected by the testing culture to say something to the teachers. And that takes of course, time. It takes energy, it takes time is money, it takes money.
(34:13):
It takes a lot to do that and become an advocate for your kid. But I think that many of your listeners are already thinking about being an advocate or are already an advocate for their kids. So, and I have talked about testing already with my kids’ kindergarten teacher, and I probably started having that conversation about a month in, and I know it sounds presumptuous, but it’s like I’m an educator too, and we have standard standardized tests on my end as well, in terms of what we should do as professionals, if you are some kind of an expert and you have some kind of relationship to tests, think about how we’re using them. Think about when an intelligence test should be the last resort. There should be so many other types of tests and cognitive tests that you would use, especially if you’re just trying to identify a learning disability, for example.
(35:20):
It’s like intelligence tests are just actually giving you such a rough assessment of what’s going on. And again, this is all, it takes time and money and all of, but the other thing is on my end, personally, I have two things that I do being that I’m in higher education, I’m a professor and at a giant public university. So one thing is that I always work to infuse my curriculum and any kind of, all the lecturing I do, all the public speaking I do, I try to make sure that some of it is devoted to criticizing and looking for a better way forward in fostering a conversation about a better way forward amongst the communities of experts and amongst my students. Another thing that I’ve done in the schools that I’ve worked in is I have fought to, in a sense, get rid of things like the G R E, the SATs in pandemic. A lot of schools, I’d say, I don’t know actually how many school schools did this, but many, many schools, including the schools I was affiliated with, they got rid of, temporarily, got rid of the gre, the SATs, right?
Dr. Sarah (36:46):
And nothing fell apart. Our world didn’t dissolve kids college and they got into places where they can thrive. I think we had this fear that if we got rid of standardized testing, what would we use then to figure out who’s good at what. And I think what we don’t realize is that students will show us exactly. Students will show us what they are good at and interested in if we allow them the reedom to show us their interests and to pursue their interest. And I love the Reggio Amelia model of education, which is child led learning. And the curriculum is literally developed over the course of the year based on what the kids are showing interest in. And the whole idea is to foster this intrinsic interest and love of learning and give children agency to pursue things and the ideas we embed the curriculum inside of their interests. Not everybody gets to do that. In fact, most people don’t. And I think it’s so important for me to help parents who are navigating the public school system and the standard American education system to be able to work within that space as well. And I think one of the most important things that we can do, in addition to all the things you listed, which is advocating for your child at school, finding out how you can opt out of testing if that’s something that you would choose to do, or even just having a conversation with your child’s school and or teacher on how that we can put tests into a context for our kids.
(38:19):
How do we help them understand this is one piece and it’s just a lower the pressure, lower the stakes for the kids around those tests, help them be educated consumers of what these tests are actually measuring and that your life is not going to ride or die on this test and you do it and then we move on. But also outside of school, in the home, one of the things that I always tell parents to do is to take a real hard look at your personal relationship and personal belief system around the value of achievement. Because I think that we are a bit indoctrinated and a bit sort of trained to value achievement above all else. And I think when we really get down to it and we’re like, what are our real values? Why is achievement important to us? What I think most people end up saying is, well, I want my child to be happy and be interested in things and want to pursue great stuff and have access to the best schools and the best colleges and the best jobs, and so they can be happy so they can do the things they want to do.
(39:25):
And what I really think we need to remember is if we just focus on achievement and drive every decision we make based off of that, we’re missing the thing that actually often leads to this internal drive to achieve. And that’s like self-actualization, right? So if we actually say achievement will follow, I’m not going to focus on achievement. I’m going to focus on having my child be aware of who they are and what they’re interested in, and have the skills to pursue with some resilience, the things that are intriguing to them. If they fail at something and they want to quit, well, they’re not going to achieve much. If so, it’s like how do we help build up the things that actually once you establish them, become the foundation for achievement? Like achievements, the byproduct actually not the goal. So I often tell parents the it’s small things focusing on process instead of product.
(40:27):
So when you’re giving your kids prey is saying, instead of saying Good job or that’s so beautiful, or you got it right to being like, oh, wow, that must have felt so good to finish. Or how did you decide all of the things that went into that drawing that you did? What were you thinking about? Or why did you pick those colors? Or, oh man, you guys didn’t win the game. What was your favorite part about playing it? How much fun was it to be on that team with those friends? And it really wasn’t it nice to have them to come together after you guys didn’t win, to be able to feel connected to them or whatever. I’m like, but this idea that we are focusing on the process, the experience of things, and that if we focus on that, that’s what we value. If we always focus on the outcome, what was the grade? How well did you do, we are telling our kids that’s what we focus on. That’s what matters. And so I think these little shifts of being more curious and having a focus on experiential components of how something occurs and gets accomplished, that is going to lead to a lot more probably achievement down the road.
Dr. Rina (41:43):
Yeah, I completely, completely agree. And this is why in rethinking intelligence, I kind of advance this new definition of intelligence or an alternative. It’s not completely novel to think this way, but instead of thinking of intelligence as this limited quantity fixed score, you only ranked so high or congratulations, you’re a winner. Sorry, you’re a loser. Just thinking of inte and your kids’ intelligence as awareness, as their ability to learn from the environment because they can learn from the environment. Are we facilitating them to enjoy their environment, learn from what is around them, but are we helping them to see that that’s really all that matters? And they will do that naturally. In fact, most of the time we stand in the way of that. So like can we give them that feeling of it is a process. Intelligence itself is a process. It’s not a score, a product, it’s a process.
(42:55):
Yeah, it’s not a product, and you weren’t just born a certain way, and so that’s great for you or that sucks for you. It’s like, yeah, it’s not about some outcome like, oh, you achieved that, you finished that. You did. No. It’s about what is your kid doing when they are at home? Like you were saying in the home environment, are they exploring? Are they asking questions? Are they picking up a book or a piece of cardboard or whatever thing that is in front of them and interacting with it that is using their intelligence. It’s that teaching them that awareness, that enjoyment of the awareness that will definitely lead to lead them to capitalize on that curiosity that burns within them. And yes, I would love for the public school system to do the same thing. And I do see a lot of the private school pedagogy bubbling up in there as well, especially at the kindergarten level, which is so far what I’ve experienced. I see that there’s a lot of that pedagogy, if not ideology of play-based and social emotional learning being the priority and all of that stuff. But there are definitely ways that we can step in and say to the administrators and say to the teachers, we value this too.
Dr. Sarah (44:40):
Yeah, our voices do matter, right? We are not insignificant in shaping things. So yeah, speak up and yeah, I’m so excited about this book and if people want to learn more about your work or get a copy of Rethinking Intelligence, how can they find you?
Dr. Rina (45:02):
You can go on, well, you can always go on Amazon. But if you want to look, I have a website, drrinabliss.com, and then there’s also a page of course on the publisher’s website. So Harper Wave, an imprint of Harper Collins. So you can go on Harper Collins or Harper Wave, and you’ll see Rethinking Intelligence there.
Dr. Sarah (45:24):
Amazing. We’ll put a link to you in the show notes so people can find it right here. Great. Thanks so much for coming on. This was so interesting and great talking with you.
Dr. Rina (45:31):
Thank you very much.
Dr. Sarah (45:38):Thanks so much for listening. Do you have a question or suggestion you want me to cover on the podcast? I want to know, please send me a DM on Instagram @drsarahbren or go to my website, drsarahbren.com/podcast and fill out the question form. That’s drsarahbren.com/podcast. Until next week, don’t be a stranger.
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