A little something called IQ

Published 12:00 p.m., July 7, 2009

I’ve been reading a book called “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.” Whew, which is what you should be thinking, along with “what’s wrong with him, can’t he find a nice mystery or biography to read?

This book is the one that lit up the world about ten years ago when the Harvard authors came out and speculated that there is a difference between people, and a difference between races, when it comes to IQ, or intelligence.

It doesn’t take an IQ test to differentiate higher levels of intelligence from lower, they said on about page 180; if the reader got this far, they’re in the upper half. If you’re reading this, and you read newspapers, you’re also likely in the upper half of the bell curve, which is actually shaped like a bell which represents the distribution of people and their intelligence, with the majority of people clustered around the top part of the bell, and the downslopes both ways show a decreasing number of people who are more—and less—intelligent

Basically what this book is saying is several things, but mainly that higher intelligent people are clustering at the upper end of American life, due to several factors, which we’ll run through shortly. This clustering, the authors believe, will end up badly for our country if we cannot find some way to reduce the effects of two groups of people, one group being the “haves,” the other the “have-nots.”

The word “egalitarian” means equal. Quite often it is applied to democracy, which we mostly believe was created because all men—and women, now—are also equal. However, hang onto your thinking cap, the authors say: “People who are free to behave differently from one another (as in a democracy) in the important affairs of daily life inevitably generate the social and economic inequalities that egalitarianism (as in equal in a democracy) seeks to suppress.”

By this last part, they’re saying that people in a democracy, by its vary nature, meaning we’re all equal, are also free to pursue different goals within that democracy, which will result in us not being equal in yearly income.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the purpose of education was to prepare the natural aristocracy (meaning the more intelligent) to govern. He said: “The best geniuses should be ‘raked from the rubbish’ annually by competitive grading and examinations.” He did believe also that this “aristocracy” of leaders should be mixed in with the general population to do the most good. He didn’t foresee, for example, career politicians.

The American founders saw that making government stable would be difficult because citizens were unequal in every respect except for their right to pursue their own interests.

Let’s take a quick look at how these authors believe American society is dividing itself top from bottom

In 1950, we went from one in fifty going to college to one in three, and we became much more efficient at getting the top students of that bunch into college. How? By giving them intelligence tests in the form of SATs and ACTs. In 1964, outright IQ tests were banned as the basis for selecting people for whatever positions by the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t affect the college entry tests listed above, in which the higher IQs do better. Now that the higher intelligences are going to college, they’re going to make more money, and they’re going to be able to buy things that the other two-thirds cannot.

In Minnesota, in MnSCU, we have what is called “open enrollment.” Is that the answer? Look at the college graduation statistics and see the drop-out rate. Did we do right by those students by giving them something to fail at right out of high school?

The questions raised by this book are fiercely attention getting.

It’s just that the answers are, too.

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