As a side hustle, I teach martial arts classes as a children's instructor at my local martial arts school. I was talking with the Grandmaster about a particularly difficult student who refuses to follow instructions and the Grandmaster said that the child's problem is that he's exceptionally smart. Because the child is so intelligent, he believes that he is superior to others and does not need to show respect to other people.
Do you think this observation is correct about intelligent people? Do you think that might be what leads to some of the negative attitudes we see in various threads of this forum?
Well, yes and no. I think there are a lot of people in the world who think they are a lot smarter than they are (parents who tell them they are special snowflakes? Lack of perception about how vast and marvelous the universe is, and how insignificant we all are in the grand scheme of things?) and they tend to be the worst.
On the other hand, I think smart people can get really frustrated and angry with other people's stupidity, which can lead to a very bad attitude. My siblings, Spelling and Busy, are both incredibly intelligent - my sister was reading fluently by the time she was two and a half, and my brother taught himself trigonometry when he was in elementary school - and truly love learning. Both had a lot of problems in school because they encountered teachers who literally knew less than they did about certain topics,
but were too proud and d-baggy to admit it, even about minor things. When my sister pointed out that Nathaniel Hawthorne was not the author of The Last Mohican, for instance, her high school history teacher kept her after class and told her, "Don't you dare ever correct me again!", to which she replied, "Well, then, don't say things that are wrong!" My brother once spent 20 minutes trying to explain
oxidation to his
chemistry teacher. (Yeah, they were two of the worst teachers in a pretty crappy public school.) Both did a lot better in college, and had far better attitudes to boot.