I think most definitions of “smart” need to consider this comment by the pretty orthodox, mainstream economist (worked with Larry Summers in the Clinton government, was a fellow at a rightwing think tank) Brad DeLong:
“There’s someone in Bangladesh who would almost surely be a better economics professor than I am and is now behind a water buffalo,” he told me. “The market economy gives me and my preferences 200 times the voice and weight of his. If that isn’t the biggest market failure of all, I don’t know what your definition of market failure could possibly be.”
“Smart” has so much to do with opportunities at so many levels, from luck of the draw of parents, schools (if any), health, and so much more, it’s not clear to me what we’re measuring. And as a university professor, I am living proof that the Wizard of Oz did not give the Scarecrow a brain, he gave him a PhD.
Don’t think either of my parents would’ve described themselves as smart. My dad never graduated from HS although he sustained a career as a printing press operator. My understanding (from him) was that he was decent at it.
My mom took some college courses but never obtained any sort of degree or even a 2-year certificate of any sort. She worked in the tech industry in the late 80s (her list of employers include HP and 3M).
Both my parents started using meth and by their own admission this seems to have blunted their intelligence/smarts. By the time they died their years of drug and alcohol use had rendered them barely functional before the age of 60.
No, they’re not.
They’re definitely not idiots or rubes (dad finally landed in skilled trades at the Ford plant and mom was the administrative assistant for the assistant superintendent of schools) but they don’t have higher education and I don’t think they were particularly good students in school. Dad dropped out after 10th grade.
Dad is swallowing the right-wing propaganda hook, line and sinker and mom is holding fast but she often seems air-headed, which may be more of an aging thing than innate abilities.
I think they did ok as adults but curiosity, validation and retaining information are not their strong suits.
Good grief! When and where was this? The parents of DesertWife paid for their son’s college back in the mid-60s but for neither of their daughters who wanted to go – a third sister was happy as a farm wife. Nobody’s permission was needed for high school, though and in fact, you had to jump through some hoops if you didn’t want to go at all.
That was ThD – Doctor of Thinkology.
Yes. For instance he’s won 657 out of our 1029 WordFeud* matches over the last decade. 8 matches were draws.
*Scrabble clone app
My folks were smart, but they are long dead. My mother, born in Nazi Germany, went all over Western Europe after the war, learning languages no end, until she settled in Spain to marry my father. My father, born just before the Spanish Civil War, started from modest rural beginnings and went to study as an adult, became VP of the second insurance company in Spain, then became an independent chartered accountant. But when Mom died, it went downhill with him. He married his secretary (not young or pretty, but a reactionary bitch) and became a racist asshole too. He died unhappy.
Yes, both of my parents were smart. They were both elementary teachers and both earned their college degrees after starting a family. Dad got his Master’s, mostly through summer school and evening classes. And both, especially Mom, were progressives/liberals long before it became fashionable. Dad died in 2016, thankfully never having to see Trump in office. Mom died in 2021, thankfully seeing Trump voted out.
Baltimore, in the late 40s (Mom was born in 1934) - My grandfather figured she’d get married and have kids so she didn’t need any education once she could read and write.
My maternal grandfather pressured two of his sons to drop out before completing high school and a huge rift occurred when a third chose to use the GI bill to get a college degree. WWII years.
I’d say so.
Mom got a bachelor’s in math in the early 40s, wen that wasn’t all that common for women. Whi Beta Kappa. Did wind tunnel work during WWII and after. Stopped working when she got married at 32. Perhaps the most well-read person I’ve ever met. Completed the Great Books series twice, very big on history.
Dad never went to college. Joined the Seabees after HS, then worked on the Panana Canal locks. Was a machinist who could fix ANYTHING. Ended up in a pretty high position for a major printer, buying and troubleshooting their presses and managing a couple of their facilities. But I’m not sure I ever saw him read a book for enjoyment.
Well, hell - of course they were smart. They made ME! 
Mom: extremely articulate, bright, loves ideas. Lefty and talkative. Very interested in science, but hesitated to “go there” when she was younger, so she never learned much math. But keeps up with science of the times, particularly space stuff. Learned how to fly when she was in her college years, from…
My dad: He had a lifelong love of aviation. Always wanted to spend time studying planes. Was a flight instructor, then an airline pilot for his whole career. Got his undergrad degree, the later on, when temporarily furloughed from his airline, went back to school and almost got his master’s degree in meteorology in the early 70’s. This disappointed his advisor, and later on it occurs to us that the things he was investigating turned out to be some early signs of global warming. (The moment his airline called him up, poof he went back, dropping his master’s like a hot potato.)
He never considered himself to be intellectual, and actually distrusted / shied away from those who did. (He had a falling out with his own dad, who was a PhD and dean of the local university biz. school.) But he clearly had talent. As a hobby, he painted realistic illustrations of…you guessed it, planes. Published a book on aircraft, sort of his own personal thesis you might say, just a couple of years before he died. Politically, he leaned conservative, but after GW Bush’s shenanigans, he told me he had had enough and was voting for Obama.
Neither of my parents made it past high school, but both were smart in different ways. Mom was class valedictorian at a time when going to college was rare. Dad could have gone to college (his mom had a Master’s, and two siblings graduated from college), but had no interest. He could fix anything, though. Both were very well read. Also, to their credit, they were never anti-science and had no use for Trumpism. They never got how easily many of their friends were taken in by ideologies they saw as extremely anti-Christian.That said, they were always politically liberal for the time and place they came from.
Right you are.
My mother’s Depression-era high school education was so bad, she had to take night school science courses just to pass the tests for admission to nursing school. She was an excellent writer, and I found out years after she died that she had been recognized for some of her stories. My father had to drop out of college and work full-time, but he read just about every book he could get his hands on, and started taking my sisters and me to the library before we were tall enough to reach the shelves in the children’s section.
Both my parents were very good at math - a skill which has eluded me.
There are still areas of the country where Daddy’s word is law and to argue only earns whippings and social isolation. Somewhere around 13 years old your only future is marriage and several babies, high school never enters the picture. You don’t argue because you’re 13, where are you going to go?
October 18, 2022
My father, before he ruined his brain with drugs and drink, was apparently a very smart man (he died in early 2022). Mom says that was one of the things that attracted her to him back in the day. My mother is a very smart woman, just not in ways that are immediately obvious. She’ll never pass the audition for Jeopardy!, for example, but she’s a voracious reader and is an expert when it comes to travel.
My mom was the valedictorian of her elementary school. She was pretty smart. She wanted to go to college, but had to start work after graduating high school to help with the younger kids. She always said she wanted to be a pathologist. She was a big reader and introduced us kids to books, but I think that was an issue of both nature and nuture. She worked as a secretary and was what would now be called executive assistant to the president of the company she worked for. She stopped working when she had my older sister. She didn’t go back to work until us kids were all well into school, and she stayed local, so, she worked for the YMCA as office manager. She was addicted to crosswords.
My dad was smart, and also a good reader, but best of all he had a great, dry sense of humor. I rate a sense of humor high on the intelligence scale. He went to a two-year Swedenborgian college in Ohio on the GI Bill. He was born in Ohio, but his family moved to California when he was six. His aunt ran a boarding house in the town where the college was, so it was a good fit. He was very social and just a nice guy. He was only 59 when he died (lung cancer due to smoking), and I really miss him.
Like most people, my parents are smart in some ways and not so much in others.
My parents are gone now, but they were both some of the smartest people I knew.
My dad came from a large family and was the only one among his siblings who went to college, where he earned a mech engineering degree. He started his professional life as a globetrotting Navy pilot, which I think maybe spurred his interest in learning about the world: when I was growing up, he seemed to know a lot about history and how various countries came to be in their present state of affairs. After leaving the Navy, he had a varied career and sucked up all kinds of knowledge from different fields. Not just tech/science, but business, financial stuff, economics, and so on. He and I really liked watching documentary programs on PBS together when I was a kid.
Dad always prepped the income tax return for him and my mom. No software or computer back then, just a pen and a handheld calculator to handle a tax situation that got more and more complex over the years. He got audited now and then, but was always able to give solid answers to the questions from the IRS that convinced them to leave him be. On one occasion when they claimed he’d made a mistake, he successfully convinced them that they were wrong.
He was a stellar diagnostician and mechanic for our family cars at a time when cars weren’t nearly as reliable/durable as they are now. He was also a self-taught expert at home remodeling - a critical part of which was knowing the building codes backwards and forwards. He read books about how to do all kinds of tradework, and had the engineering background to understand how to tackle various structural engineering challenges with home mods/additions entirely of his own design. He always thought stuff through and planned/prepped against various contingencies; his projects hardly ever went awry.
Mom didn’t have the opportunity to attend a 4-year college; she went to a secretarial school instead, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t smart. She spent her first 15 years of married life as a stay-at-home mom before starting a career as a legal secretary. She was damn good at it: before she retired, she was working for the senior partner of a high-dollar law firm, earning almost as much as my dad did at his engineering job. Along the way, she learned things just like my dad did: she taught herself lighter home remodeling skills, and advanced from the basic homemaking skills she learned as a girl until she was a wizard in the kitchen and at the sewing table. She could whip up gourmet meals, including recipes of her own creation, and she made clothes from scratch - some from pattern kits, and some completely of her own design. She indulged in craft hobbies like embroidery, macramé, and knitting - mostly the latter, and she was really good at it.
Were they smart? Hell yeah. They were lifelong learners who were both really good at planning and thinking their way through the expected and unexpected challenges of life, and they used their knowledge to rise from humble beginnings and provide a better life for themselves and their family.
Does he run a cult?