Smart, yes. Not brilliant. My mother was given a full ride scholarship to a teaching college. Her father refused to let her go because it was upstate. He was by all accounts a lovely man but he was the product of his time. I did not have the opportunity to ask him why going away to college was worse than a 19 year old girl working as a secretary in NYC surrounded by men on the real life set of Mad Men (substitute engineers for advertising). After raising us she worked as a librarian.
My father left high school to try and get into WWII as a Marine. He was still in training when it ended. They were too poor for him to go to college anyway. After the Corps he trained as a technical drawer and draftsman. He would have made a damn good engineer.
Both were hardworking, open minded and curious people who could have gone further if given different opportunities. As it is they made a good life for their 4 children.
Brilliant. They set an unrealistic standard for me in evaluating the rest of the world - I initially expected everyone to be as brilliant as they are. They both have professional, degrees from very prestigious schools and went on to very successful careers - my father eventually became dean of a prestigious professional school; my Mom was one of very few women to attend professional school at the time (we’re talking single digit numbers). They can talk intelligently about a broad range of subjects and have an amazing intellectual curiosity. Now around 90 years old, they are both retired and spend a huge chunk of their time in the adult education program at a local university (my Mom is on the Board), taking classes in subjects ranging from the works of Virginia Woolf to current Middle East politics to Chinese art. Smart is pretty much their brand.
They also watch Jeopardy every night, competing fiercely to get the correct answers, and play Wordle together every morning.
No. My father was a voracious reader. His mother, my grandmother, was town librarian, so there was some brainpower from that line. My dads brother went to college and became a math teacher, so I see where I got it from.
It turns out that my mother was something of a musical prodigy in her youth, but never touched it after high school. Curious, that. Neither went to college. Small town with very limited role models and opportunity. Neither identified as smart, or expressed opinions or interests.
I feel like, as others have said, it comes down to how you define smart. Neither of my parents were well educated but I would consider them both fairly intelligent.
Dad was a farm kid who barely made it out of high school and went straight into the garment factory where he stayed until he retired. He was embarrassed by his inability to spell correctly and had very little book knowledge. However, he could take one look at a machine and know exactly how it worked and how to fix it and was extremely good at practical math like fractions and dimensions related to his woodworking projects. He could also look at a piece of furniture, decide to make one himself and then go home, sketch out a rough plans and duplicate it. He wasn’t an educated guy, but he had a real sort of practical intelligence that I always admired.
Mom was much more of a reader and thinker. Though she never finished college, she read constantly and kept detailed journals that she gave me shortly before her death. She was a bookkeeper and deputy clerk for the local chancery clerk’s office and had an amazing ability to manage money and accounts. She would have made an incredible accountant if she could have stayed in college. She was also the best Jeopardy player I’ve ever been around and would routinely answer every question on entire episodes.