Most pedagogical systems inhibit excellence

“Nothing in this World makes People so
Afraid as the Influence of an Independent
Minded Individual” — Albert Einstein

 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.

The resultant stratified metric is termed ‘intelligence’ - Binet’s means of streaming young soldiers into job categories taken to extremes. His methodology - quick, inexpensive and replicable through normative Fisherian statistics - has been equated with intellect to such an extent that most other 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 and IQ, particularly in an attempt to stream the lower classes as they progressed through compulsory acculturation to dominant social narratives via the antonymically named public ‘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 Giocometti 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 army – both areas were regimented subservience to authority and externally imposed ontology are desirable for success. SAS, IQ, GRE, etc. (regarless 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 to 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 average 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 hypothesis that PhDs in managerial science hold 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 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? There will be a strong disinclination of such to participate in society, or to be known by a society steeped in the falsely predicated mythos of its own sustainability. The well known cases of William James Sidis, Norbert Weiner, Emilie du Chatelet, Alexander Grothendieck, and the like illustrate the point nicely. 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.