Debating educability: diverging social representations of abilities in Finnish educational discourse

By surveying a representative sample of Finnish parents, this study set out to compare two social representations of intelligence current in our educational discourse: the established one, ‘the idea of natural giftedness’, and an emerging one, ‘the idea of the multifariousness of abilities and support for social equality.’ It was found that the parents’ social positions and their views on the malleability of intelligence contributed to their endorsement of the two representations. The idea of natural giftedness was endorsed particularly by academically educated fathers and those viewing intelligence as a genetically determined capability, while the idea of the multifariousness of abilities and support for social equality was endorsed by mothers and those with the view that intelligence can be developed through practice. It was suggested that these two polemical representations appear to embody opposite views in regard to the deeprooted controversy between nature and nurture and reproduce the basic cultural separation between the abilities of ‘head’ and ‘hand’.