Who Sez Working Stiffs Ain't Intelligent?

What intrigued me about "The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker" (see record 2004-19515-000) was, first, the author's inclination to attribute intelligence and complex cognitive skills to manual workers, service workers, working stiffs, or "ordinary" people, and not only to elitists like college professors, lawyers, and engineers in the "new economy." What Mike Rose has been able to do is get into the heads, hands, eyes, and ears of such people as waitresses, hairstylists, painters, electricians, and metal workers. He shows, through careful observational procedures, how these "ordinary" men and women think and the brain power they use in order to successfully discharge their duties and functions. What is remarkable about this, in my judgment, is that it is usual for intelligence tests to put a premium on higher level cognitive skills such as verbal fluency, quantitative skills, problem solving, and the like, but it is generally the feeling, probably at the unconscious level, that ordinary workers are not very smart, and, when these working-class people are students, that they are pedestrian, lower level vocational students and not the college-bound elite. What Rose has managed to do is to show that the common conception of intelligence has to be broadened and deepened in order to accommodate the cognitive skills of everyone and not just professional people. I believe that this concept should be taken seriously and that psychometricians and others who think about intelligence should pause and consider the kind of intelligence that is used by working-class people. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)