Have you read Freddie DeBoer's recent book "The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice"? He explains just what cognitive ability is (what an IQ score purports to measure) and how essential it is to educational and professional achievement. Well worth reading.
P.S. DeBoer is a dyed-in-the-wool classical Marxist, so no knuckle-dragging right-winger.
Thanks for the info. It sounds as if the book might frustrate me, but I think I need to read it.
There is the old saying, "Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result." As our public schools continue to fail, the solution that educators offer is to do still MORE of it.
It bothers me that we think of intelligence as linear, something that can be measured on a linear scale. Intelligence is spatial: A person can be very smart about this thing over here, and ignorant about that thing over there. There are different means by which people assess reality. None is necessarily more valid than the others. Yet one approach might measure out well on and IQ test, and another measure low.
I was a public school teacher for six years, and came to recognize the obvious. Each student is unique. Some will learn academically, which is to say they will absorb what they are taught and be able to reliably repeat it back. That student may, or may not, have the ability to extrapolate beyond what he has been taught. Other students are less academic but show clear ability to intellectually project possibilities and draw conclusions beyond what they have been taught. And, frankly, many students just don't care and just don't learn. They may or may not have a high IQ. If they don't care, they don't learn. I was very surprised to find that one such student, who consistently failed in all his classes, had one of the highest IQs in has class.
The biggest failure of progressivism is the premise that we are all alike; it's just our experiences that vary. That is pure BS. And that is the biggest failure of public education.
Here's an essay I wrote that gets at this. It's about freedom, but still gets at the heart of what we're discussing here:
You're confusing (I HATE 'conflating') IQ with qualities of creativity, intuition, memorization, inference, understanding, and a host of other variable abilities and talents which make us unique and uniquely human.
IQ measures raw processing power. Think of it as the rate at which brain cells register and transmit impulses. There is a "blink test" which correlates reasonably well to measured IQ. A light is flashed and the subject presses a button as soon after the flash as possible. Faster reaction time, quicker brain response, higher IQ. Pretty simple really.
Murray/Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve" is still the standard for understanding IQ in America and all its complex social implications. DeBoer's "Cult of Smart" on the other hand, quickly and ably accepts that IQ is highly heritable and that it matters HUGELY—on an individual basis—in education. He explicit denies the existence of and refuses to discuss group differences (racial, ethnic, sex), and he can do so because it's simply not germane to his argument. For an educator, I think DeBoer's book is the more relevant and important. Should you wish to more fully understand IQ and how it is measured and distributed across America, Murray and Herrnstein are excellent guides.
I guess we'll agree to disagree, somewhat. I don't think we're enormously far from each other.
My point, and I'll stick with it, is IQ as a quantitative measurement has limited usefulness or predictive power. We can both go on and on, but my life experience (including psych courses dealing with IQ), tells me that IQ as a measure of a person's functionality is not reliable. Then agaIn, as psychologists everywhere say, when asked "What is intelligence?", they're facetious answer is, "It's whatever it is that the IQ test measures."
I don't suffer fools gladly—never have, never will. Happily, it looks like your escape from the category is imminent (depending on your reading speed). Here's to INFORMED discussions in the future...
Have you read Freddie DeBoer's recent book "The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice"? He explains just what cognitive ability is (what an IQ score purports to measure) and how essential it is to educational and professional achievement. Well worth reading.
P.S. DeBoer is a dyed-in-the-wool classical Marxist, so no knuckle-dragging right-winger.
Thanks for the info. It sounds as if the book might frustrate me, but I think I need to read it.
There is the old saying, "Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result." As our public schools continue to fail, the solution that educators offer is to do still MORE of it.
It bothers me that we think of intelligence as linear, something that can be measured on a linear scale. Intelligence is spatial: A person can be very smart about this thing over here, and ignorant about that thing over there. There are different means by which people assess reality. None is necessarily more valid than the others. Yet one approach might measure out well on and IQ test, and another measure low.
I was a public school teacher for six years, and came to recognize the obvious. Each student is unique. Some will learn academically, which is to say they will absorb what they are taught and be able to reliably repeat it back. That student may, or may not, have the ability to extrapolate beyond what he has been taught. Other students are less academic but show clear ability to intellectually project possibilities and draw conclusions beyond what they have been taught. And, frankly, many students just don't care and just don't learn. They may or may not have a high IQ. If they don't care, they don't learn. I was very surprised to find that one such student, who consistently failed in all his classes, had one of the highest IQs in has class.
The biggest failure of progressivism is the premise that we are all alike; it's just our experiences that vary. That is pure BS. And that is the biggest failure of public education.
Here's an essay I wrote that gets at this. It's about freedom, but still gets at the heart of what we're discussing here:
https://donewithparties.com/how-free-are-you-2/
You're confusing (I HATE 'conflating') IQ with qualities of creativity, intuition, memorization, inference, understanding, and a host of other variable abilities and talents which make us unique and uniquely human.
IQ measures raw processing power. Think of it as the rate at which brain cells register and transmit impulses. There is a "blink test" which correlates reasonably well to measured IQ. A light is flashed and the subject presses a button as soon after the flash as possible. Faster reaction time, quicker brain response, higher IQ. Pretty simple really.
Murray/Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve" is still the standard for understanding IQ in America and all its complex social implications. DeBoer's "Cult of Smart" on the other hand, quickly and ably accepts that IQ is highly heritable and that it matters HUGELY—on an individual basis—in education. He explicit denies the existence of and refuses to discuss group differences (racial, ethnic, sex), and he can do so because it's simply not germane to his argument. For an educator, I think DeBoer's book is the more relevant and important. Should you wish to more fully understand IQ and how it is measured and distributed across America, Murray and Herrnstein are excellent guides.
I guess we'll agree to disagree, somewhat. I don't think we're enormously far from each other.
My point, and I'll stick with it, is IQ as a quantitative measurement has limited usefulness or predictive power. We can both go on and on, but my life experience (including psych courses dealing with IQ), tells me that IQ as a measure of a person's functionality is not reliable. Then agaIn, as psychologists everywhere say, when asked "What is intelligence?", they're facetious answer is, "It's whatever it is that the IQ test measures."
Not about disagreeing—about knowledge vs. ignorance. You can do something about that (references given earlier).
A little snarky, aren't we? You have no idea what my range of knowledge and experience is, yet you feel qualified to judge it.
But I have started reading de Boer's book. Frustrating and informative at the same time.
I don't suffer fools gladly—never have, never will. Happily, it looks like your escape from the category is imminent (depending on your reading speed). Here's to INFORMED discussions in the future...