In graduate school more than 50 years ago, I wrote a paper about the purpose of higher education. It was one of the first papers I wrote and it was for a class in the history of higher education. Really, it was the history of Western higher education. What is "higher"? In the American system, we have elementary or "primary schools". Quite a bit later, we developed "high school", not without some resistance and opposition. Why warehouse eager, energetic young people in front of blackboards and textbooks when they could be milking cows or hoeing weeds?
For more than 20 years, I have worked with a campus organization that aims membership at older and mostly retired people. We have a mix of people who never graduated from high school on up to PhD's who had a post-doc fellowship (apprenticeship). The other day, the energetic, well-spoken man said that he wasn't smart enough to go to college. I have often heard people assess their own "smart"-ness by ranking themselves and others by years of schooling. I can assure anyone who is interested that number of years of schooling, even with all top grades, doesn't guarantee such a student is "smart". Just deciding what "smart" is has been deviling people for more than a century.
If you can speak a complex language like English or any other tongue, if you can read English, if you can use a smartphone or a car, you are definitely smart, whatever grade you got from Mr. Smith.
