I would say it's there are wind-up toys and there are self-guiding missiles. The rote memory / think for yourself distinction comes earlier -- it separates the bottom 70% from the top 30%. That gets you your honors students. They can all think for themselves. But. Can they extrapolate and see the working of thinking itself?
Example:
Read any poem by Yeats and try not to think about his antisemitism. FFS, Yeats, srsly? Anyway.
The dummies won't be able to handle it at all. They'll either try to eat the book or light it on fire to impress another dummy. We have now discarded 50% of the population of the average high school. MAGA!
The mediocre kids will be able to remember the poem is by Yeats, and that he uses irony here, metonymy here, antistrophe here, and synecdoche (which I always have to look up -- it's referring to a part by its whole or vice versa. That's right!) here, because the teacher said so. Put them aside, we're down to the 30% in honors.
The honors kids will be able to identify irony, metonymy, antistrophe, and synecdoche in a different poem, even in an extremely different form, because they now understand the definition of these terms. This is where the kids jump from "remembering" to "learning." That's what I mean by wind up toys -- these are the kids who are commonly referred to as bright. What they are is coherent with the community standard of intellect. They are good doggies. Send them off the college. We're down to 10%.
Now it gets interesting. The 10% can do everything the other 90% can (these are aggregating categories) but they can also identify brand new techniques and tricks that a poet uses without ever being told about them. They can't name them of course because names are arbitrary pointers. But they can "see" the constellation of intent, poise, style unfolding from the words. These are the smart kids. They get beat up a lot. Salieri is the ur-smart kid. C'est moi, c'est moi, tis I.
And then there are the 0.01% who can do all this and also create utterly new things. They can make new meta-patterns where none existed. These I will call geniuses. I've met maybe a dozen because I have been very, very fortunate in who I've gotten to hang around with. 1 in 10,000 seems about right to me but nobody knows. More in NY, fewer in MS. These are the Mozarts. And of course our culture, like all cultures before, leaves 99% of them to die destitute and be laid (lain? I forget) in a potter's field or, worse, work 9-5 at an insurance company.
)
