The greatest mistake of education has been to assume that intelligent people are automatically good thinkers. High intelligence does not ensure effective thinking--it may actually make a person a poor thinker. For example, a highly intelligent person can take any view on a subject and then use his intelligence to defend that view. The more perfect the defense, the less chance the thinker has of actually exploring the subject. Other aspects of the intelligence trap include the need to be right, the need to show oneself to be more clever than others, critical rather than constructive thinking, and reactive thinking rather than projective thinking.