Most pedagogical systems inhibit excellence
Some people are ambidexterous. But most are not. One might even posit that the majority are ambisinister. Why...?
College entrance
Brigham adapted the Yerkes’ U.S. Army Alpha Test for use in college admissions, renaming it the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Starting in 1934, Harvard adopted the SAT to select scholarship recipients at the school. The SAT has since become a universally used test in the United States, and to some extent, in Canada. This dispite the fact that Brigham, like his mentor Yerkes, later repudiated most of his earlier work and expressed the conviction that there was no such thing as a universal human intelligence quotient or IQ. Before his death he activly opposed the use of PIs in selecting students for college.
In his work ’Factors of the Mind’ [Burt, 1940], a Taylor-Binet believer Sir Cyril Burt first applied factor analysis in an attempt to correlate occupation to IQ. His work was used by the designers of the educational system (from Durkeim’s followers onward) to convince themselves that IQ and similar tests were appropriate to slot students into selected educational streams. Hence young children were streamed. Not according to aptitude, teacher recommendation, interest, ability, parental wishes, or the child’s own predelictions... but by a PI metric.
The psychometric scores for college entrance, just as with Binet’s IQ scores in primary school, are used by most registrars at post-secondary institutions as a single linear predictor of student performance. As determinants of eligibility for college entrance. These PIs have become so universally used that most students and college administrators directly equate SAT scores to academic fitness largely regardless of recommendations or other factors. They have become the primary cutoff tool of college authority for determining college.
This despite overwhelming evidence of their failure to predict performance beyond the level of chance and of their strong cultural and class biases [Astin, 1971; Breland, 1978; Freedle, 2003; Labov, 1975; Freedman, 2003; and many others]. The following quotation from Breland and Minsky’s interesting paper which clearly shows the many flaws in using SAT as a predictor is of interest:
“This means that [for figures provided by ETS researchers], on the average, for 88% of the applicants (though it is impossible to know which ones) an SAT score will predict their grade rank no more accurately than a pair of dice.” [Breland, 1978]
Data provided by the University of Indiana shows that chance would have predicted grades at the same rate as the SAT-Verbal score 99.96% of the time [ibid, pp. 149, 153]. Astin found that SAT scores failed to predict freshman performance above a chance level [Astin, 1971]. A study using data from the National Longitudinal Study (NLS) of the high school classes found that SAT scores only adds between 0.1 and 2.7 additional correct forecasts per 100 college applicants [Crouse, 1988], i.e., a negligable and non-statistically significant amount.
IQ
While some social groups lack a concept of intelligence, and others define it in ways unfathomable, western society has a more or less universally accepted view of intelligence. That is to say, it is considered a measure penetrable through statistical comparison and psychometric testing.
Parmedides and his disciple Zeno of Elea disagreed with the prominent view of their day that deductive logic was the greatest attainment of the human mind. Zeno challenged the view by creating his well known series of paradoxes which required non-linear, non-deductive thinking. Such paradoxical reasoning is not tested by any IQ test. An IQ test gages the tendency of the testee to think in a particular way. That way may not be optimal. For example, in a modern day version of Zeno’s objection, research by psychologists Sternberg and Davidson on the relationship between puzzle solving and IQ found that the two were seldom correlated [ Sternberg, 1982].
The resultant stratified metric is termed ‘intelligence’. From Binet’s original means of streaming young soldiers into job categories however, it has become little more than classism in the guise of science. Yet the quick, inexpensive and replicable metric has come to be equated with intellect to such an extent that most other means and manifestations of such are ignored. What matters appears to be not what the tests test, but rather their statistical tie to professional success.
It is moot that the contrived merit of correlation statistics, or of the considerable doubt mathematicians have cast upon ‘g’ and related correlative methods bare any relation to predictability. Or whether the questionable use of factor analysis is of worth other than as a rather malign attempt by those in high social strata to align occupation with IQ in streaming. Particularly in an attempt to stream the lower classes as they progress through compulsory acculturation to dominant social narratives via the antonymic ‘education’ system. Such metrics do not measure sense of humor, happiness, good parenting skills, creativity, artistic ability, or for that matter any of the major attributes that render a Giacometti or a Rodin as persons of genius.
Rather what they do and do well, is predict the ability to succeed in lower school or in the armed forces – both areas were regimented subservience to authority and externally imposed ontology are desirable for success. SAS, IQ, GRE, etc. (regardless of the Rasch model or its polytomous cousins) may therefore be good indicators of subservience and doxal adherence/acculturation, but little else. Further, although MI theory and some attempts at linking
fMRI activity - particularly in the 3rd and 4th cortical layers - to ‘intelligence’ seek to provide a less absolutist approach, they none the less are subject to the same criticisms as are legion in the failures of standardized tests. They similarly do more than stream the plebeian poor to perform menial subsistence as the foot soldiers of
demagoguery.
The result is that the average high school dropout in the United States has an IQ of 96. That of the average college student is 115. The mean IQ of an average MD is perhaps 110-120 (depending upon test). Of a graduate PhD around 130-140, depending again upon the measuring tool, research source, and of course, discipline (for example, one might loosely posit that PhDs in managerial science’ obtain scores in the low 50s). What is of interest here however is that standard deviations even in this upper range, are so close to the mean as to render differences somewhat minuscule. Only when the admittedly biased and prejudicially contorted IQ metric is at say 200 or so, are the SD’s sufficiently distant from the mean for meaningful difference to manifest. And then only just.
But what of those whose scores are homogeneously high? That is to say, several standard deviations above the norm in MI and IQ metrics, as well as in art, literature, etc. What of true polymaths? Well, for these folk there has always been a strong disinclination to participate in society. The well known cases of William James Sidis, Norbert Weiner, Emilie du Chatelet, Alexander Grothendieck, and the like illustrate the point. As do the much lesser knowns such as Stanely Bergman, Philis Holst, and so on. For homogeneously high outliers are in the main purposefully invisible, and seldom if ever participate in the pedagogical narcissism of an imposed, acculturated, self-referential narrative.
Or more bluntly stated: Some people are naturally ambidextrous. But most, sadly deprived of potential thanks in no small part to the prevalence of acculturation to the imposed norm, are ambisinister.
“Nothing in this world makes people so
afraid, as the influence of an independent
minded individual” — Albert Einstein
