I think the opposite is true.
I know when Mrs Cad was out jobhunting, dumbasses were getting interviews instead of her because they had bachelor’s and she “only” had an associate’s and 20 years experience.
Intelligence is far more important. One’s ability to gain anything from education is largely determined by one’s intelligence. Intelligence affects your ability to remember and understand material. Someone with an IQ of 85 is going to struggle to really get anything out of a college course on Economics.
On the other hand, being smart affects just about everything you try to do. Some things more than others, obviously. But you could never go to college and still be much better off just for being smart.
I’ve meet plenty of intelligent but not very educated people and they were usually a joy to be around.
On the other hand, I’ve also been around plenty of highly educated people that were not very intelligent (or at least not as much as they thought their education indicated). Not only were they not a joy to be around, they often pissed me right the hell off.
Intelligence without Education = potential
Education without intelligence is impossible
I don’t know… you could wind up being president someday!
I think in polite society we call the difference ‘street smart’ vs. ‘book smart’. I’ve always found street smart people more interesting.
Going by my own definitions of both of these words, I’d choose education, but given that the popular usage of that word tends to fall more in line with what I’d refer to as “quantity of expensive pieces of paper”, I’m inclined to go the other way.
Intelligence is good. Use of intelligence to increase your own knowledge and understanding is better. Use of intelligence to increase your understanding of the processes by which you expand and apply it is best, rarest, and vastly underrated. The latter two of those are what I’d call education. Expensive paper has little to do with any of them, though it does serve admirably as a pretense at quantifying the unquantifiable (which function in all its forms has proven very popular among society in general).* As evidence that mainstream thinking is at odds with my definition, I’ll point to the fact that a series of two- and three-letter initialisms is considered not only an acceptable, but expected, summary of one’s educational history. If that’s the sum total of what “education” is, I’ll take raw but proven intelligence every time.
- Yes, this is a snarky oversimplification, but I try to limit myself to four feature-length diatribes per year and I don’t want to waste one on an IMHO poll.
This board is proof that people think that an education equals success. Yet also proof that an education is not better… due to the lack of intelligence.
I figure you need both. But if you’re intelligent but not educated it’s a lot easier to get what you’re missing than if you’re educated but not intelligent.
Intelligence doesn’t get you a job without education, these days. There are plenty of educated idiots with good jobs, though. I vote education.
Smarts are better than book smart.s
These days, education can equal success, with or without intelligence. I realize that personal anecdotes are not data, but my husband could have been where he is now, career-wise, ten years earlier, if he had had the degree to match the experience. My FIL, a retired electrical engineer for Westinghouse, was hired as a technician, because he lacked a degree. He did all the work the engineers did, but he didn’t get an engineer’s salary; it was only after he’d been with them for fifteen years and threatened to walk if they didn’t promote him, that he got the money he deserved.
This is hard, because education and intelligence are so ill-defined. So I’ll be more specific:
I think knowing how to learn something (education) is worth more than already knowing it (intelligence). No matter how smart you are, there’s an upper limit to the amount of data you can store in your brain. There is no limit to how much data you can find elsewhere.
What makes this difficult is that I agree with [del]RoOsh[/del]ToeJam. But that’s because an uneducated person can become educated, while a stupid person who has already been educated is stuck.
So it boils down to how you look at the question, rather than any innate difference in the two. I’ll go with my first answer, but I could have just as easily gone with ToeJam’s.
I see now where I differences lie:
For me, Intellegence is the capacity to comprehend knowledge.
Education is simply the piece of paper that says you were taught some knowledge.
I have knowledge as the pure raw information itself.
Intelligence is the potential and capacity to understand knowledge.
Education is simply the proof that you’ve been given knowledge.
Neither on their own really has the knowledge though. Intelligence alone will not give you knowledge, and Education alone will not give you knowledge (I can show a power point on particle physics to a 7 year old for 50 hours, and if that child has no capacity to reason or understand the information it’s wasted on them, but I can also give them a shiny piece of paper saying the child has completed the requirements to gain credit hours for watching a course on particle physics).
The piece of paper will certainly help him along better in monetary situations, but again without the capacity to understand it, nothing’s gained.
And the highly intelligent 7 year old will be in the same situation if I ask him about particle physics without ever having taught him the material (nor him going out to seek it himself).
Both are basically the same way to the endpoint, though I believe one is better from a monetary standpoint, but the other is better just in life and in general.
Of course I suppose if I had a family to feed and other obligations in life, I may choose the other answer, but for now, I pride intelligence as a better thing to have without knowledge vs. Education without knowledge.