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Paul Tough address the issue of intelligence as an indicator of value in education.  NB: The library has Tough's latest book - "How Children Succeed"

"In the Western understanding, students come to school with levels of innate intelligence and curiosity. Teachers try to further arouse that curiosity in specific subjects. There's a lot of active learning - going on field trips, building things. There's great emphasis on questioning authority, critical inquiry and sharing ideas in classroom discussion. In the Chinese understanding, there's less emphasis on innate curiosity or even on specific subject matter. Instead, the learning process itself is the crucial thing. The idea is to perfect the learning virtues in order to become, ultimately, a sage, which is equally a moral and intellectual state. These virtues include: sincerity (an authentic commitment to the task) as well as diligence, perseverance, concentration and respect for teachers. "

"Can a cat be both alive and dead? Can a computer think? How does a tortoise beat Achilles in a race? Voiced by comedian David Mitchell, these fast-paced animations explain six famous thought experiments, from the ancient Greeks to Albert Einstein, that have changed the way we see the world. Subjects as vast as time travel, infinity, quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence, are squeezed into 60-second clips that will tickle your funny bone and blow your mind."

"The 11th graders in Mrs. Olson's class said the backchannel had widened their appreciation of one another. "Everybody is heard in our class," said Leah Postman, 17. Janae Smith, also 17, said, "It's made me see my peers as more intelligent, seeing their thought process and begin to understand them on a deeper level." "

"Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics. First, their members contributed more equally to the team's discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men."

A group of Canadian scientists who specialize in learning, memory, and language in children think so. They've found evidence that pre-schoolers can improve their verbal intelligence after only 20 days of classroom instruction using interactive musical cartoons.

"Perhaps, instead of proving that handwriting is superior to typing, it proves we need better note-taking pedagogy."

""The amount of potential unlocked by the industrial revolution is dwarfed in information terms by what you can do with computers," said Ari Geshner, a senior software engineer at Palantir, a much-discussed data analysis startup whose customers include US intelligence and defense agencies. "Digital literacy is about learning to use the most powerful tools we've ever built." The tricky part comes in defining what exactly is meant by "use." Most people who use computers don't know how to build software. Does that mean they're digitally illiterate?"

"Digital literacy is about learning to use the most powerful tools we've ever built."