House of Eratosthenes

A fascinating comment stream took root & started growing over at American Digest after Gerard linked to the Polymath Archives article about the Inappropriately Excluded. I thought I should weigh in on the talks because, to me, it’s a matter of first-hand experience that you do not need to be a genius to experience these problems. My I.Q. has been nailed down somewhere around 128 to 135, never more than that, and if this is to be believed then it puts me in the middle bracket. Top-end of the middle tier, maybe, but not in the 140+ genius bucket.

But I’ve been watching this happen pretty much every hour of every day. Yes, it’s a sad way to live and a sad thing to see, and it isn’t just me…

The exclusion really begins in primary school with the failure of the educational process to provide an appropriate learning environment. The grading process, which should be a reliable assessment of knowledge learned and skills acquired, becomes nothing more than a measure of the child’s willingness to bend to the will of the teachers’ demand that he or she acquiesce to a profoundly inappropriate curriculum and learning process.

Leta Hollingworth noted that, if mainstreamed, children with R16IQs over 150 (D15IQ 141) check out and do not excel. Miraca Gross has done a long-term longitudinal study of 60, 160+ D15IQ Australian children. 17 of the children were radically accelerated, 10 were accelerated one or two years and the remaining 33 were mainstreamed. The results were astonishing with every radically accelerated student reported as educationally and professionally successful and emotionally and socially satisfied. The group that was not accelerated she characterizes as follows: ‘With few exceptions, they have very jaded views of their education. Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficulties at university, not because of a lack of ability but because they have found it difficult to commit to undergraduate study that is less than stimulating’. These children have IQs similar to Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, etc., so the loss from unrealized potential is enormous.

I think what’s really happening is people of all IQ levels, are being disciplined to act as if their IQ is more toward 100. As we make more “progress” with this, we’re defining-downward the level of above-average intelligence that is to be subjected to this shoehorning. We’re becoming more militant about what this acceptable-behavior is supposed to be. And we’re applying the force to more and more walks-of-life, telling more and more people “Take your admirable initiative, your plucky resolve and boundless resourcefulness and take them somewhere else.” Point is, it’s a continual process. The attitude I saw of “This educational experience is not for you, and we don’t care” is exactly what a child would have encountered forty years earlier, with an IQ of, say, thirty points higher. Conversely, today’s kids might do a much better job of fitting in than I managed to do — their quotients may be fifteen points lower — and would not have been subjected to this sort of treatment in my day. But here it is, now and not then, so they have to be medicated. So it’s institutionalized tall-poppy syndrome, and what is happening is the cutting line is getting lower.

A few people said some things that made my jaw drop just a bit, obviously assuming everyone with an I.Q. over 140 must be acting like Sheldon Cooper and all of the time. Then Rob De Witt pointed out,

Like I said, “Learning how to dumb yourself down for acceptability sometimes seems useful as a way to fly below the radar.”

For example, look at the unmitigated envy and projection displayed in this comment stream. A kid with the poor judgement to be born smart is gonna eat this crap for breakfast every fuckin day of his life.

There’s a certain annoyance factor to being subjected to this exclusion; the excludee cannot help but wondering is maybe this is a good thing that just happened, if he can sever the links with some degree of finality (which is not possible with grade school) maybe things are actually gonna start getting better now, some suffering will now have entered the final chapter. Maybe? You look back at those doing the excluding and you wonder about the calibration between their immediate ambitions, and the long-range objectives of the mission. You know the gap is there, because the gap created the situation that culminated in this outcome — for you. It hasn’t impacted anyone else. Or maybe it has. Or maybe it never will. And yes, it’s possible that now that they’ve gotten rid of you, everything is going to go swimmingly. But not only is it tough to see that, the pattern doesn’t seem to hold up anywhere.

Schools, for example. Now that they’ve got the out-of-the-norm kids all diagnosed with phony disorders and properly medicated, are they humming along? Operating efficiently? Inspiring public confidence?

I’ve noticed it before…don’t recall when or where…and I continue to notice it, can’t help noticing it. The word “bureaucracy, whether we want to admit it or not, is a pejorative word. Nobody ever says “I want to build a great bureaucracy, that is a shining example to all other bureaucracies.” No one wants to do that. The bureaucracy is not the machinery that performs a vital function, it is the rust upon it. And we all know it. It’s woven into our lexicon, people don’t really disagree about it, they just refuse to acknowledge it.

What is alarming is not that this is happening, since there is evidence it has always been happening. It’s human nature. What is alarming is that it’s getting worse. The Sheldon Cooper of the 1960’s was Spock, Science Officer of the Enterprise. Well, Spock was occasionally funny to watch, but much more often he was responsible for saving the Enterprise. That’s important. Not that high intellect doesn’t have these trade-offs, the original Star Trek series even had an episode about how you don’t really want Spock to be in command of too much, or too often. It’s not one of my favorite episodes.

In fact, people like to make a big deal about how the womens’ movement back then did not succeed in creating aspiring female engineers, and we still have some work to do on that now. A few moments of honestly recalling the old character of Spock, and the public’s reaction to him, sheds some light on why this is. Boys watched Spock, and took notes about how to apply logic to solve a problem. Girls watched him and became fascinated in the human-interest drama arising from a half-human half-Vulcan encountering and dealing with prejudice, and finding a way to make peace while straddling the divide between two worlds. If they took notes, the notes were about how Spock felt. The male half of the audience really didn’t give a rip what Spock felt, any more than they might have cared what one of John Wayne’s characters felt.

But we have become more feminized in the meantime. Now we have to worry about, once the cat is let out of the bag that “Those with high I.Q.’s are being inappropriately excluded,” if that message can be proliferated then the common reaction will be something like “Awww…how does that make them feel?” But read the article again. The real consequences of this exclusion are on everybody else. It’s a waste of human resource. It may be okay to fall prey to the impulse, since it’s part of the human condition and it’s a story that didn’t just begin yesterday. It isn’t okay to continue the practice. And it certainly isn’t okay to make it worse & worse with the progression of time.

CS Lewis pegged this before either of us was born in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” the regrettably-neglected follow-up essay to The Screwtape Letters.

Screwtape notes (in 1960!) that the educational system had basically devolved (under the devils’ tutelage) so that “children capable of tackling Aeschylus are stuck listening to their coevals’ futile attempts to master ‘a cat sat on a mat.'” And elsewhere, that the great mass of the studentry don’t really care if the nerds are smarter, so long as they can punch them in the head and kick them in the stern. But educators think that they’ll get “a trauma” – “Beelzebub, what a useful word!” – if they get left behind or if the smarter kids get moved up. And it ends up, as you have observed here, with really talented kids intentionally dumbing themselves down to be like everyone else, because they’ve been told – and often enough, in actual explicit terms – that they have no right being any different than anyone else.

I rejoiced finding this essay, though I wish it had been sooner. This hits where I live. I can’t remember back to a time when I didn’t know how to read, for example. And I’m told I do fall into the 140+ IQ bucket (though I won’t say the actual number).You can well imagine how ridiculous I thought kindergarten was when I was handed (no lie) a coloring book and graded on how well I stayed within the lines.

After weeks of my flatly refusing to do my “work” and complaining that I was bored, they got sick of me and I was sent for testing; my parents were told that I was “emotionally disturbed” and placed in the BOCES III program – the New York State educational system’s remedial learning system for lackwits. My parents pulled me out of the public schools and tried any variety of private schools – including one housed in one of the old tycoon mansions along the north shore of Long Island, whose owners eventually were arrested and convicted of tax evasion. I really was taught very little until fourth grade, when Mrs. Linda Conroy (bless her forever) set up an individual course of learning for me with the help of her very dedicated colleagues, all of whom donated otherwise-free time to give me work in their own subjects.

My own lack of ambition is the primary factor in my not making “more” of my native brains – all on me – but I was given what amounted to a four-year suspension right at the start of my formal education and I can’t see how that could have possibly helped me, nor solved any problem at all. Nor do I see how it helped any of the other kids either. It was purely so that the public schools of New York had one fewer challenge on their hands.

So damned right the Sisko is angry.
- nightfly | 04/17/2015 @ 09:13
Similar story, though I never tested in the genius range. I’d be excited each September about the new school year starting. That very first week, I’d grab the textbooks and read them –all of them– right away. Then I spent the rest of the school year looking out the window and making up stories in my head to entertain myself. (And this allegedly WAS a college-prep high school.)

I remember one year my parents tried to get me “more challenging” course work. The teachers doubled my homework. Whoopee.

Anyway, the short version is — I’ve always wondered if my life might have been better if “somebody” (teachers? parents?) had had the skills and patience to ENGAGE me in learning back in the beginning, when I was (unknowingly) setting up my lifetime habits. (And I’m not saying I’ve been miserable — I had an enjoyable 30-year career working with midrange computers, I have friends and a social life . . . but I recognize now, in my 60’s, that I wasted a lot of my time and potential back during my “productive years”. The plaintive quote from “On the Waterfront” comes back to haunt me: “I coulda been a contendah!” Sigh.)
- A_Nonny_Mouse | 04/17/2015 @ 20:12
Oh, nightfly – thank you, thank you!

I did that “reading all the textbooks the first few days” thing, and was generally reading other things during school.

I checked out of most classes in my school days. My teachers learned not to call on me when I was disengaged, hoping to have me answer “I don’t know” (so they could self-righteously tell me I needed to be paying attention). I generally knew the answers they were looking for.

What a waste those days were! Instead of studying something useful during the day, I picked up more outside of classes.

You’re right, this leads to bad study habits, and gaps in learning of basic concepts, that makes further learning harder.

My mother was offered the chance to accelerate me – skip a few grades – but chose not to, lest I embarrass my 2-years older brother by being in the same grade.

I’m with you – offering more homework is NOT the answer. Only a dummy would work harder for the same grade.

I’m just finishing a course in teaching the gifted, so this discussion has been quite helpful
- rau | 04/18/2015 @ 05:50
Dunning Kreuger.
See, here’s the logic problem.
“We need to have specialists in the system to cater to children with special needs.”
It’s a a socialization/ self esteem thing.
WELL, here’s the rub. That socialization thing where kids are tortured for “Acting all white and shit..” by the stupid kids, and lack of ANYONE in the “free public”system, from “The Board, to over paid administrators, (who seem to always need “assistants” for assistance) to “specialists” who themselves need “extra time” in the educational industrial complex to address “special” kids, that are simply unqualified to educate/engage kids with demonstrable “smarts’, and an IQ even ONE Standard Deviation (about 15 points) to the right of their “educators”.
SO mandatory behavior modification drugs are now on the menu to address behavior resulting from SCREAMING boredom, and forced retardation in development.
I prattled on in another thread about NOT “minding my own business”, LOOSELY related to “It takes a village…”, but in a practical direction. (SEE: Secondhand Lions, “the talk”)
I’m often amused when folks who proclaim “Ooooo, my (fill in relative/charge here) is REALLY bright”
has to face “That’s only compared to YOUR level of thinking, or Um..no…they’re average, it’s just that you’re comparing them to the “lower information” folks around them.
OTOH, I’m equally amused by incredulous disbelief and mockery from parents/teachers of select kids (where I recognize a pattern) , that have a “history” of discipline/social issues, when I suggest they take a (free) Mensa “at home” test.
It can be a strong negotiation chip when pointing out to “The Board”/administration/teachers/”special” teachers, that they are no longer suited to “supervise the education” of certain “other side of the curve”special ed. folks. Of course, one must dumb it down, lest the “self esteem” of such education professionals be tarnished.
- CaptDMO | 04/18/2015 @ 06:28
Speaking for the educator’s POV for a sec (I’ve got near and dear ones in the biz): The checked-out genius kid is actually a best-case scenario. Thanks to the elimination of ability tracking in most districts (cuz it’s raciss), one’s typical classroom contains a genius, three or four bright kids, a bunch of middling students including a few avid apple polishers, and four or five practically special needs kids who might or might not stab you. Under those conditions, a checked-out kid who turns in his homework — or reliably fails to do so — is one less troublemaker you have to deal with. Because you’re only answerable to the bureaucracy, which only cares about test scores, which means you’ve GOT to get the low end of the bell curve to pass the damn test, no matter what. At least a Ritalin zombie with a 140 IQ will pass, and won’t shank you.

This also explains the “just assign more homework” approach to “challenging” the gifted. It won’t do anything for the kid’s learning — everyone involved knows that — but it inflates the stats the bureaucrats see (you can measure “pages of homework assigned;” you can’t measure actual learning for someone who could’ve aced the damn tests when they were in elementary school).
- Severian | 04/19/2015 @ 13:33
I feel it’s less the feminizing of the whole system, and more the dumbing-down to “leave no child behind.” (Despite the fact the biggest practitioners of this were GWB’s loudest critics.) In a world where every kid needs to be handed a trophy for “playing their heart out” while simultaneously being unskilled, under-motivated and over-entitled, it’s not a huge stretch to think that a liberal teacher’s union feels no shame in dumbing-down individual school districts so that same child can be lauded for knowing that 1+1=37 and leetz is correct spelling as long as the child feels good about the answer.
- P_Ang | 04/19/2015 @ 17:43
My IQ has been tested on numerous occasions and it pings back and forth between the 136/137-143 range, depending on the day and, who knows, what flavor Pop-Tart I ate for breakfast. I will say that having an IQ 2-3 SDs above the mean is nothing to brag about, especially since I’ve a few in the 5-6 SDs above the mean. The gap between them and me is greater than that between me and the 100 IQ guy. And what I’ve noticed is that high IQ does not equal genius. Yes, I think it’s a necessary component, but I don’t think it’s everything. People have noticed that I’m at least somewhat bright, but no one would mistake me for a genius.

In any event, I grew up before education started catering to the lowest common denominator. Until I got pushed into advanced materials, I used to get dinged for daydreaming in class. Hey, I was bored. Eventually, they allowed those of us with the aptitude to move forward at our own pace.

Related: there is a lot of money for special ed at the local schools, but only a handful for gifted students. I have mentioned on more than on occasion that gifted students have special needs, too. Most of the teachers are in agreement with me, but the powers that be at the higher levels disagree due in large part, in my opinion, to the piles of money that the government dumps into the special ed programs.
- Physics Geek | 04/20/2015 @ 13:59
From the 4th to the 7th grade I spent a lot of time missing school. Hospital time included. Mom was my instructor for a good portion of that time.She expected results, and did not feel that they were hard to achieve.
I was a year young for my school grade and looked like the results of being sick. Was scared to death of going to the 8th grade because I was going to be so far behind all those other kids.

Good job mom. (Something I should have said much more often than I did.) No one else had been exposed to algebra, or Greek and Latin history, or atomic theory (much was already dated, but was still exposure). I got bored in school quite a lot after that. One of my teachers told me I could do anything, I could be President! With the clarity of hindsight I know I never wanted to be a President, but I would not have minded growing up to hang a senator or two.

Scores on past IQ tests were unduly influenced by education proficiency. Vocabulary, algebra and calculus tend to give a higher score than my raw intelligence would have received. Plain sweat is a major factor in true intelligence. Inspiration is rather harder to estimate. Scores bounce all over from 127 to 153. Army GT was 143+.

There would have been an awful lot accomplished in and by america is we had been putting money into gifted programs. Maybe that is why it was not done.
- Theo | 04/20/2015 @ 21:37

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