How We Are All Contributing To The Lack Of Intelligence In The Society by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

What Intelligence Actually Means

What are the things you believe need to change in terms of intellectual participation and contribution, if we are to have the environment we really desire?

Before we unpack that, we need to look at what intelligence actually is. Intelligence is not a PhD. It is not eloquence. Anybody can speak good English or big grammar and still not be intelligent.

• Intelligence is how quickly you learn from a previous mistake.
• Intelligence is how you solve problems and think critically.
• Intelligence is how you apply knowledge to relevant issues.

Looking at Africa, and Nigeria as a case study, the first problem is that we are an anti-intellectual society. We don't reward intellect. We don't reward intelligence.

An Anti-Intellectual Society

A young person can go on TikTok and do something funny and become a celebrity overnight, while the best graduates in a university are given nothing to celebrate. There is something called modeling. Albert Bandura ran what is called the baby doll experiment: children were made to observe an adult beating a doll, and they later repeated what the adult did. That is where social cognitive theory came from, how we learn from our environment.

A child who grows up never seeing an aeroplane will never dream of becoming a pilot. Your dreams and aspirations are a result of what you have been exposed to. You are not permitted to imagine what you have not seen before.

Curriculum, Deliberate or Not

People make environments, and environments make people. There is also something called curriculum, a series of learning experiences that produce a certain outcome. This curriculum can be deliberate or indeliberate; you may not be conscious of it, but something is driving you.

• Association is not just your friends. Association is the pages you follow, the accounts you engage with, because nothing exists in a vacuum.
• Every environment has a residual effect on the people inside it.

Why Systems Elsewhere Reward Talent

You are a university lecturer, a professor, at this age. Do you think it would have been possible for you to achieve this in your own country?

No. In the United States, if you graduate top of your class with a bachelor's degree, you do not need a master's before a PhD. Many people doing a PhD in the U.S. get there straight from a first class or a strong second class with work experience, and once you can defend it, you get into a fully funded programme. It is a smart system, because they know that when you invest in talent, that talent produces results and generates revenue. Even the people at the top of that system are not more intelligent, they simply understand that investment requires a return.

Schools Condition, They Don't Reward

Can we say that brain drain happens because the system does not support young people?

Yes. We are an anti-intellectual society, and even our schools reflect it. Schooling is the oven for the mindset of a society. Look past what is taught in chemistry, biology, and physics, and look instead at the social conditioning inside the academic environment: you want to write an exam, you are frustrated before you even get there. That frustration becomes education itself. Whatever doesn't require rocket science is made difficult here because of what people have been conditioned to think. When someone is slow to develop, the community accepts it as normal, because the system has engineered that slowness into people.

• When someone finally succeeds against that conditioning, people assume an external force must be responsible, jazz, an extra grace, rather than recognizing simple diligence.
• A twenty-four-year-old girl in a developed country can finish paying for a mortgage and a car while still in school, running her own businesses, because the system and the culture around her expect that of her.

You cannot live beyond your thinking process. The outcome in our society reflects the quality of our thoughts, and the quality of your thoughts is shaped by the information you have access to.

A Father's Quiet Curriculum

What shaped you personally?

My father was a driver, though I didn't know it until I was in secondary school. He left the house every morning in a shirt and tie, well dressed, and made sure there was always food at home. He made sure we did not mix with children in the neighbourhood who were already drifting. When he got to the office, he would remove the shirt, put on a plain top, and run errands for younger staff. He never hid his salary from us. When he retired, he showed me his pension cheque and said, "I worked here for twenty-five years, see what they gave me, and one day you will make this amount in a single day." That has since come true.

Seeing young men who were well dressed and well coordinated in that office environment shaped what I aspired to. I did not want to be the man with two tricycles in the neighbourhood, oppressing people because he had access to a few girls who couldn't speak good English. I knew there was more.

Closing Thought

You cannot live beyond your thinking process, and someone once said, if you don't think, you stink. The outcome we see in society is a mirror of our thought pattern, and what shapes that thought pattern is the information and the models we are exposed to.