Thanks for reassuring me, Neocon! Mike's equation was rather excessive:
The higher your IQ = the higher your IQ/SAT/... scores = the bigger your payslip! Ultimately, it comes down to claim that in order to estimate somebody's intellectual quality, all you have to do is to check his/her bank account!
Here's RECOMMENDED READING for Mike:
THE BIG TEST
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN MERITOCRACY
The story of the SAT and standardized testing, by Nicholas Lemann
the-big-test.com
Excerpt from Chap.I:
Here is what American society looked like, from the point of view of Conant and Chauncey, at the close of the Second World War. They took it as a given that the essence of American greatness was a quality that Alexis de Tocqueville had remarked upon early in the nineteenth century: social equality, of a kind that would be unthinkable in any other country. Because the United States didn't have a rigid class system, it could take full advantage of its people's talents and at the same time generate intense social cohesion across a range of physical space and a variety of ethnic origin that elsewhere would have been considered insuperable.
But during the early twentieth century American society had taken an ominous turn. Conant and Chauncey accepted without question the view of Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian of the American West who was a Harvard professor in their younger days, that what had made the United States democratic and classless was the availability of open land on the Western frontier. Now the frontier was closed, the country had become industrial, and the cities were crowded with immigrant workers, many of whom were socialists--or who, at the very least, believed that group unity, rather than individual opportunity, was the highest good.
Even worse, a distinct American upper class had emerged. It was very much on display at Harvard and other leading universities, where, up to the start of the Second World War, rich heedless young men with servants, whose lives revolved around parties and sports, not studying, set the tone of college life. The plurality of Harvard students had come from boys' boarding schools in New England, the kind where parents could register their sons at birth; pretty much anybody who went to one of these schools, and was not "a little slow," and could pay the tuition, could go to Harvard, or to Princeton, or to Yale. Even the faculty was disproportionately made up of proper Bostonians, rather than modern academics.
Harvard and institutions like it fed into another series of institutions: law firms, Wall Street financial houses, the Foreign Service, research hospitals, and university faculties. These, too, had begun to look like the province of a hereditary upper class. All the good places were reserved for members of a certain group--the all-male, Eastern, high-Protestant, privately educated group to which Henry Chauncey belonged. No Catholics or Jews were allowed, except in rare cases that required of them a careful extirpation of any accent or other noticeable expression of their alien culture. Nonwhites weren't in close enough range of membership in the elite to be excluded. And even the fieriest social reformers of the day didn't think to suggest that women ought routinely to participate in running the country. Snobbishness, small-mindedness, and prejudice were the worst aspects of the elite institutions, but even at their best they were preoccupied with a vaguely defined personal quality called "character," and tended to ignore intelligence and scientific expertise. But these, precisely, were the traits Conant thought most vitally necessary in postwar America.
What could you do to dethrone this upper class and restore the United States to its true democratic nature? It was a question without an obvious answer. Using the educational system to create a fair society, which seems today like the way to do the job, looked then like a distant, unrealized, possibly unrealizable dream.
At the close of the Second World War, the United States had been the world's leader in trying to educate a large part of the citizenry for more than a hundred years. During the nineteenth century Americans created, not without a struggle, the free public elementary school as a basic social institution and, during the first half of the twentieth century, the high school. These institutions weren't well enough established to be taken for granted as they are now. In 1940 the country still hadn't passed the milestone of graduating more than half its teenagers from high school. The idea that there might be a way of evaluating all American high-school students on a single national standard and then making sure that they went on to colleges suited to their abilities and ambitions--most people would have regarded that as a wild, futuristic fantasy, although Chauncey and Conant were among a handful of people who knew that, technically, it could be done. [...] |
