George Land and Beth Jarman’s longitudinal study of divergent thinking (often called a “creativity test”). In 1968 they used a test originally developed to help NASA identify innovative thinkers. They gave it to about 1,600 children aged 3–5. Results they reported: •Age 5: 98% scored at the “genius” level for generating many novel ideas •Same children at age 10: 30% •Same children at age 15: 12% •Adults: about 2% Land’s conclusion, published with Jarman in Breakpoint and Beyond (1993), was that non-creative behavior is learned. Schooling, rules, “one right answer,” fear of being wrong, and pressure to be practical train most people out of the open, generative thinking they showed as young children. Sir Ken Robinson popularized the same idea in his 2006 TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”: we do not grow into creativity; we get educated out of it. He quoted Picasso (“every child is an artist”) and argued that standardized schooling stigmatizes mistakes and ranks subjects so that many innate capacities atrophy. Important caveats This is not a finding about general intelligence (IQ). Large bodies of research show the opposite for IQ: years of schooling reliably raise test scores (typically 1–5 points per year in quasi-experimental studies). The Flynn effect (rising average IQ across generations) is also partly attributed to expanded and intensified education. Land’s numbers are widely cited in education and business talks, but the original study was not published in a peer-reviewed journal; it appears in their book. Later creativity research often finds different age patterns (divergent thinking does not simply collapse after age 5). So the 98% → 2% story is a famous illustration of how conventional schooling can suppress one kind of thinking, not a settled scientific law about intelligence itself. In short: the claim that we are “born intelligent and then conditioned out of it” is a popular reading of Land & Jarman’s creativity data plus Robinson’s critique of industrial-era schooling. It is strongest when “intelligent” is understood as open, generative, mistake-tolerant thinking rather than IQ.