Clever is as clever does. What’s the point of brilliance? And should we want it for our kids?

Throughout my childhood, I was repeatedly told I was clever. The more I was told it, the more I wanted to live up to it, and in the absence of beauty, wit, tact, charm or much in the way of bi-lateral coordination, being clever became my thing. I left secondary education with a clutch of A grades, despite an otherwise tumultuous end to my school years and followed it up with a first from a top uni and then went on to do a post grad. Clever, clever me.

And that’s when it stopped. There’s no value to being clever when you are the mother of young children, which requires far more physical grit than mental clout. In fact, being clever served only to disappoint me and encourage me to foist on my children my own claim to cleverness by attempting to rig their IQ by rote in a slightly self-defeating way. I eventually went back to work, defeated, only to be sent to the back of the queue for having spent some time out of it. Clever is as clever does, or so it seemed, and in the eyes of the work hierarchy, my cleverness counted for little when my experience  – whatever that’s supposed to mean, was thin on the ground.  I was forced to do low capacity tasks to “prove my worth”, for years on end, repetitive things that used very little of my brain, pointless things but for the fact someone wanted them doing and was willing to pay. In the end,  I nearly had a nervous breakdown. For all my labours, they made me redundant anyway. What use is cleverness when you’re weeping in the gutter unable to feed your children?

But I persevered, (perseverance in the face of defeat is my strong point, and perhaps, ultimately what separates cleverness from the lack thereof, when it comes to that vague yet magnetic goal of achieving some form of recognition) through idiot managers, psychopathic bosses and people with more cash than qualifications. It felt, to all intents and purposes that I’d been conned. The people who had the most financial success were often the least qualified. There was an inverse correlation between what I was told was clever and being able to make your own way in life. Like my father, a dyslexic inventor who has achieved world wide success with his business and zero qualifications, I started to question the point of all my academic success at all. It was, proof be told, all academic. I started to forget I’d ever considered myself to be clever at all.

In fact, I became quite resentful of all my efforts, for so little reward. I stopped encouraging my children to be clever. After all, what was the point? It would only lead to frustration. I stopped pushing them with school work, and allowed them to do what they like, be it computer games, or watching TV – I gave up on extra curricular classes and refused to help them with homework they couldn’t manage on their own. I figured it was better to be normal than an intellectual freak. I felt that whatever I did to help them would only backfire. And I noticed a pattern emerging from their peers.

Kids are all good at different things, all of them clever, in their own way. Many were quite good at lots of stuff, and some kids, like mine, were truly excellent at a couple of things, but fairly crap at others. In other words, the cleverness tended to balance out. In fact, the only thing separating the various types of cleverness was how those skills are valued as adults; and by the school, in testing them, segregating then, putting a value on skills that often have so little meaning out in the real world. We’re all evolved to fill our niches and there’s not a lot anyone can do about that.

So I figured that since I was “clever”, so too would my kids be. I was right. My son is very much like me. Driven, ambitious, brilliant, but socially awkward, forgetful, unwittingly rude. Book clever. How it will translate to real life remains to be seen. My daughter in the other hand needs a bit more help because I was so much less pushy with her. She’s more well-rounded, less outstandingly brilliant, but empathic, kind, likely to be happier. But then who really knows how it’ll all pan out? My older sister, long thought the “clever one” as when we were small, lost the plot as a teen through pressure by the time her exams rolled round. I outshone her out of spite, as much as anything else.

The point is, although I occasionally get social plaudits for my writing, these days I spend an inordinate amount of time feeling very stupid  –  ditzy, made careless through over-repetition, juggling too many things (or thoughts) at once, confused by the blindingly simple made over complicated by many hands, or simply stretched too thin with little time to consider things properly. I am no longer thought of as clever. Just someone who meets a deadline well enough. I have not a brain for facts, and the world only has so much use for nebulous concepts. One philosopher is enough for the world, it seems (and Alain de Botton’s got that market cornered) so my skills, such as they are are undervalued, wasted, forgotten, pointless.  I over think things, and people don’t keep up. I am alienated and socially-crippled by my own awkward intelligence. I get into arguments that are unwinnable with people I will never meet, who will never see my point of view. It’s painful. It could even be considered, like Asperger’s (I got assessed once, as my son is diagnosed, but I’m too successful, it seems for an adult diagnosis, for all the characteristics are there) a disability.

I had forgotten I was ever considered clever, so little use has it been to me. But then, searching for a course to take my mind of the misery of the daily drudge, to give my witterings a sense of authority, authenticity, a philosophy qualification that will give legitimacy to my claims, I found the perfect thing – a part time masters, that would enable me to continue to feed my children, and to go where the other clever people are, at a local, but renowned institution, to hopefully write something useful off the back of it.

I never felt quite so much at home as when I was at uni, where geeks come out of hiding and revel in their cleverness. So I dug out my plaudits in full confidence of being accepted, the clutch of As and the long forgotten first, and the diploma, that have languished, unloved, unlooked at, uncalled for, unnecessary for so long, failing to consider how I’d pay for the thing, because dear old Dad, with all his bitter wealth and frustrate acadmia, fails to see the point in yet another certificate. I can, naturally, see his point.

Yet it’s the recognition: that vague yet magnetic yearning to be recognised as clever, that I recalled in my tutor’s reference from so long ago, dug out with some residual pride, now long since fallen. I still can be brilliant, I still have time, just about – in which to inspire my children to be brilliant also, but by showing them, rather than telling them. Because, much like the quantum bear that shits in the woods (perhaps all the woods, at once, for eternity and then again not at all), does cleverness even exist if no one’s there to see it? I would argue perhaps not.