Intelligence Reframed:
Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century
Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 15:31:52 -0400
From: "John Winston Bush" <jwb@alumni.stanford.org>
Subject: Re: My child's IQ is bigger than yours
From Sarler's article:
"Special schools are springing up for the 'awesomely bright' and parents will kill for a place as, once, they would have done for a classy zip code. "It is almost laughable that many of the special schools are also the authority which tests the children; they solemnly report back to the gullible parents that, guess what, the child is so intelligent that he or she has won them the\ chance to pay a zillion dollars a year for the school to educate him."
Prize example of what Sarler meant: Since 1965, the toniest private school on Brooklyn has boasted to inquiring parents about how many of its graduates go on to elite universities. http://www.saintanns.k12.ny.us/info/honorframe.html
Virtually in the next breath, they inform the parents that their child will be given an IQ test to help determine his or her suitability for the school. Few parents of my acquaintance have drawn the obvious inference that the school is claiming credit for the talent already evident in its pupils as early as the age of three. Gullible parents, indeed.
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Comment
My child's IQ is bigger than yours
The parents who see their bright offspring as status symbols really do need their heads examined
Carol Sarler
Observer
Sunday May 12, 2002
One of my first tasks in journalism took me to interview a chap whose claim to fame was an IQ so high it couldn't have been measured on the Richter scale; indeed, he became some premier cheese in Mensa and was wheeled out as a promotional tool for the organisation.
The trouble was that the IQ was his only claim to fame: he worked menially - in a bingo hall, as I recall - and had little success with personal relationships because he was, frankly, odd. Not mad or bad, just lacking in social ease or grace, as I had unkind fun in demonstrating within the piece I wrote. Two days after my snitty lump of prose was published, he killed himself. His note did not blame me specifically; it just wailed his feeling that nobody, really, understood him back there in his tormented, excluded isolation, alone as he had been with the genius IQ that had bought him, in his whole life, absolutely nothing.
Full text
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4411931,00.html
