Welcome to Morning Feature’s Tuesday morning feature, Things We Learned This Week. The course is open-enrollment, with no exams or homework, optional attendance, and hugs for all. Our only request is that you share something you’ve learned this week in the comments, be willing and interested to think about what others have shared, and discuss if you feel so inclined.
This morning’s discussion topic: Intelligence.
It occurred to Professor Crackpot Caractacus, while sipping his morning elitist-latte, and flipping through his liberal-propaganda-paper, that intelligence just may be (profound thought alert!) the most politically controversial psychological construct known to man!
It might be worth thinking about that a little bit. Especially in the context of modern conservatism's regression to the mean and the strange appeal of GWB and SP.
Please join me below...
"Abstract, universal superiority and inferiority is an absurdity." -John Dewey
Thanks to Cenk Uygur, Kossack extraordinaire, I have this to share with you today (skip to 1:30 if you don't want to watch the while thing, from that point it's only about 45 seconds long):
Thanks again to Cenk, a transcript:
Bill O'Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?
Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I'm not saying that that has to be me.
Cenk Uygur on Sarah Palin's intelligence (or, rather, lack of it).
That's not too different from:
So, what's going on here? And how does this relate to the politics of intelligence? That depends on two things, your definition of intelligence, and how you value it.
It turns out that American educational psychology does have an historical streak of elitism. Funny though, it doesn't come from the liberal left but the autocratic right. Let's take a quick tour of some of its leaders.
Louis Agassiz& S. G. Morton
Proponents of Polygeny, a theory that each race was born of a separate and distinct creation event. Opposed Darwin's theory of unitary ancestry. The races were easily ranked as most intelligent and most beautiful to least so and so, based on lightness of skin color, which corresponded with climate at the location of creation. Measured skulls as surrogate for measuring intelligence. Very influential academics in Europe and the United States.
Intelligence = racial group membership.
Francis Galton
Cousin of Charles Darwin, he believed that intelligence was a real thing and could be measured just like the length of a person's arm. So, he devised early intelligence tests to do just that. Those who scored poorly were a drain on those who scored well and should be prevented from having children so as to reduce the drain on the top. Those at the pinnacle of society should be encouraged to reproduce more often so as to get more children of better stock into the system. A genuine, but misguided genius, he also invented the word eugenics (good genes), discovered fingerprints, and coined the phrase "nature vs. nurture." If you weren't white and rich you were genetically predetermined to have a hard, poor, stupid life. Good luck to you, then.
Intelligence = "eminence" or whoever Galton thought was important, invariably white males in his own social group.
Paul Broca
Best known for discovery of a brain region associated with speech. Measured empty skulls with buckshot, believed larger skulls were more intelligent people as they had larger brains. Struggled with measurements of eminent people with small brains, and morons with large brains. Argued that they actually proved his argument true rather than refuting it. Guess which racial group had larger brains according to Broca?
Intelligence = physical brain size, contributed to later thinking that intelligence is a physical trait like skin tone
Alfred Binet
Tasked by French govt. to devise a way to determine which students needed extra help to succeed in school. Test questions included looking at a candle, repeating random number sequences, gullibility (proctor asked the child to point to the nichero in a picture, if the child pointed they didn't score the point, if they didn't point, as there is no such thing, then they scored the point), and drawing a picture from memory.
Interested in helping learning disabled students do better in school.
Intelligence = set of mental abilities including memory, verbal and numeric reasoning, and problem solving that can be measured by comparing them to children of the same age as the test subject. These can all be increased over time, not static.
Stern
Created mathematical manipulation of Binet's test results and called it IQ. Mental age was a child's score on a test compared to his age-mates' scores.
Intelligence = mental age (Binet's test result) times 100 divided by actual age.
Charles Spearman
Invented factor analysis because he needed a statistical tool to prove his assumption that intelligence was innate and unchangeable. Unfortunately built his statistical method on a basis of correlations, which can predict things but not prove their causality. Scores on intelligence tests tended to be generally high or low, leading Spearman to conclude that the only plausible cause for this consistency was genetic. Either it never occurred to him that a person could score well on a number of tests because they had learned a number of different things at home or at school or he repressed the thought. We have all struggled with this paradox ever since...
Intelligence = g, or general intelligence, one underlying thing that determines all of a person's abilities, invented after comparing a person's test scores with their other test scores.
Lewis Terman
The Big Kahuna. The Godfather of Giftedness. Terman took Binet's test and built an American version which he called the Stanford-Binet. Used it to test American GI's in WWII (Binet's had been used in WWI) and public school students in California. Turned Binet on his head. He looked for high-scoring people to give them better opportunities, as the success of a society depends directly on the success or failure of its most intelligent children. Never occurred to him that the test he used might not be an accurate assessment for people who couldn't speak English, or who had no books at home. Big proponent of eugenics and forced sterilization of those who were not "worthy" of passing on their genes.
Intelligence = positive correlation between test scores and life success, genetically fixed potential used to rank-order everyone who took the test.
Arthur Jensen
Researcher in the 70's who updated Galton's and Terman's statistical techniques from correlations to regressions. Published attacks on Head Start and Sesame Street and led a movement to end their public funding as a waste of valuable resources on people who were genetically inferior to white people.
Intelligence = test scores correlated with other test scores.
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray
Authors of The Bell Curve, 700 pages of charts and test results "proving" that white people are genetically more intelligent than darker skinned people, all based on correlations, regressions, and factor analyses. One of the most controversial books in intelligence history.
Intelligence = Scores on intelligence tests that purportedly measure memory, reasoning, and metacognition but really only measure socioeconomic status and skin color.
Conclusion
All of these intelligence theorists worked in the mid 19th century to the 1970's. With the exception of Binet, a true maverick, they each believed and promoted with authority and enthusiasm the idea that intelligence is genetically determined (not only like skin color, but along with skin color), fixed (you can't get smarter as you get older), and appropriately used to rank order people from smartest to dumbest as easily as tallest to shortest. These men gave the illusion of scientific evidence as support of racist social programs and legal systems.
That inheritance is a fact of life for anyone who has taken, or will take, an ACT, SAT, Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, Regents Exam, SOL (standards of learning, blame Virginia, not me), or OGT (Ohio Graduation Tests). That these tests are based on a system of thought about intelligence that is deeply flawed, racist, and doesn't even really measure intelligence or potential for success seriously troubles me as an educator and a liberal/progressive person.
This was never a problem for conservatives when white me were 100% in control of the social institutions of government and schools. And, by control, I also mean were the primary beneficiaries of those institutions as well. Conservatives strongly advocated the very elitism they now decry. Once schools and govt. jobs became more diverse starting in the late 50's/early 60's, however, we started hearing about the elitism of over-educated liberals.
In other words, when it serves their political and economic interests, conservatives are just fine with elitist education and intellectualism. They were ok with it for over 100 years, at least, when only whites were allowed in the best public schools. When they don't think it serves their purposes, however, the very same things are the work of the great latte-sipping satans. IOKIYAR becomes INOKIYANAR.
More on that tomorrow, and a very different set of theories of intelligence that don't consider intelligence to be unitary, genetic, or rank ordered. In other words, modern attempts to correct for that long history of racism and discrimination in intelligence testing and school placement tomorrow.
TWLTW
- Ayn Rand's favorite television show in her later years was Charlie's Angels. She was a big fan of Farrah Fawcett.
- Samuel Adams produces a beer that is 27% alcohol and sells for $150 a pop. The name? Utopias.
- The Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York was built in 1885. Performers from Mae West to Bruce Springsteen, Sonny Rollins to Antonin Dvorak (conducting his own work) have graced its stage. Mrs. C. directs children's musicals there every few months as part of their children-in-the-arts program. I knew the place was old, but thought it was built in the 20's or 30's, so I looked it up and was stunned by the history of what I found. Very cool.
- I learned more about having shingles than I ever wanted to know.
- Jon Stewart introduced Bruce Springsteen at the Kennedy Honors by saying, "Bob Dylan and James Brown had a child which they left between exits 8 and 9a on the New Jersey Turnpike."
- One of America's most prominent eugenics supporters? -President Woodrow Wilson.
What Did You Learn This Week?