Word: iq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...order to believe this, though, you have to believe that merit and a score on an IQ test are the same thing. Long before IQ was invented, America prided itself on being a country without a class system, in which the talented and industrious would rise and be rewarded. The advent of intelligence tests did not dramatically affect the degree of social mobility in the U.S.--at least not enough for any change to show up in the social-science data. If IQ tests measure a trait that is genetic, and therefore inherited, or a trait that is culturally transmitted...
What they have done, though, is create a kind of mini-meritocracy for a few people who are very high in one ability. If you score in the top 1% on IQ tests, a system is in place in this country that is amazingly good at finding you and offering you access to a first-class education that can often lead to first-class job opportunities. People with very high IQs don't necessarily run the country; they do, however, usually have access to a privileged and protected position...
...IQ tests to limit the opportunities of most other people that led to the anti-IQ rebellion that broke out in the last third of the century. It was probably most intense in Britain, whose public schools at midcentury had adopted a particularly severe system of sorting by test at age 11. By 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court had banned the use of IQ tests in employment except in very rare cases...
...point is not how much the use of IQ testing has been curtailed but how widespread it still is. IQ tests are more consequential in schools and the military, where large numbers of people have to be processed quickly, than they would be at work, where it's easier to demonstrate ability through performance over time. They also have a more pronounced effect on the lives of people who score very low or very high than on the lives of people in the middle. Still, it's hard to grow to adulthood in the U.S. without ever having taken...
What we've decided now is that we'll identify, assess and honor a much wider range of human abilities than just whatever it is that IQ tests measure. That's the theory. The practice is that IQ testing--cheap, consistent and established--is still ubiquitous. Even the attempts to supplant it pay IQ the tribute of accepting its frame of reference. We have got used to trying to understand what goes on inside people's head in terms of "intelligences" and "quotients," and there doesn't seem to be any way to put that particular horse back...