intelligence tests

have been one of my research topics for the past few months and I have been convinced to give up my idea that the "smart" deserve some kind of institutionalized recognition. Measurement of intelligence and aptitude testing have done too much damage to American education. One of its side-effects has been the fueling of a uniquely American anti-intellectualism: the ordinary American is rightfully suspicious that the attempts since the early part of this century to put a number to one's "aptitudes" is both bad science that leads to bad policies. Testing created an entire industry that works to justify the unequal distribution of both wealth and opportunity that distinguishes this country from all others.

I think, after spending some time in Asia, that the deference towards intellectuals and writers that we saw on a global scale in yesterday's BBC poll has nothing to do with respect for "intelligence", but rather there is a widespread recognition that what government needs is independence of mind that is represented by the material privations of this class.

In the United States, popular resentment of intellectuals or intelligence cannot simply be blamed upon reactionary politics, corporate ideology and the small business owner resentments. (This was Richard Hofstadter's view.) There is actually grounds for real discontent with what Steven Jay Gould has called the mismeasure of minds and the recruitment of an industrial managerial and technocratic elite. That this suspicion of the prerogative of intelligence is exploited by conservatives is certainly no surprise, but it seems logical since liberals have not been able to come up with a truly radical notion of egalitarianism. What Nicholas Lemann proposes at the end of the book The Big Test is that only free high quality public universities and free public post-secondary education can produce broad democratization and a revitalization of political culture and life in the US. Not affirmative action, not better SAT's, not quotas, not false meritocracy -- not generous scholarships to Ivy League universities for smart underprivileged hardworking types, not the promotion of the model minority, not fighting "sterotypes."

Why was it so easy for us to give up the fight for affordable if not free higher education for all American youth? Everyone seems to have accepted the higher and higher tuition bills, the crippling student and credit card debts that burden our twenty-two year olds as inevitable...An aggressive program for free public higher education could have been the only successful counterpunch to the conservative assault on affirmative action. which as Lemann showed was a jury-rigged progressive solution to intractable problems of racism and test cultures.