Preview

My Child’s Iq Is Bigger Than Yours

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1175 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
My Child’s Iq Is Bigger Than Yours
My child’s IQ is bigger than yours

In May 2002 an article titled ‘My child’s IQ is bigger than yours’, written by Carol Sarler, was published in the newspaper ‘The Observer’. The article expresses a harsh critique of the IQ measurement in general, especially the problems concerning measuring children’s IQ, and the newly snobbery behind this tendency. ‘The Observer’ is a major British newspaper, published on Sundays. As its sister newspaper ‘The Guardian’ it is known for its left-of-centre political stance. The newspaper’s readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion, which is represented by the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats.

The article is a reaction to the BBC television programme called ‘Test the Nation’, which appeared on television the night before the article was published. The author of the article, Carol Sarler’s, opinion on the idea of testing our IQ is unequivocally presented in the subtitle of the article: “The parents who see their bright offspring as status symbols really do need their heads examined.” She thinks that it is absolutely wrong to measure intelligence – especially children’s intelligence. Because of the article’s subjective point of view, it is a feature article. In this article Carol Sarler shares her opinion on the topic by using a sarcastic, and slightly sophisticated, language. The purpose is to make the reader laugh and at the same time get disgusted by the image she gives of parents being pathetic. Throughout the article Carol Sarler balances between the laughable and the serious aspect of the topic, she addresses in the article. While the title and subtitle of the article is rather humoristic, the article’s opening story about a highly intelligent young man, who committed suicide, is deeply tragic. In this connexion it is important to note that this article is written in extension of the author’s earlier article about this specifically intelligent young man, who committed suicide only two

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In “Hidden Intellectualism” Gerald Graff explains his view on intellectualism and how the education system only limits intellectualism to book smarts. Graff also enlightens the misunderstanding on society with “street smarts.” He explains that everyone including “street smart have potential and they are overlooked.…

    • 259 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the authors writing “Hidden Intellectualism” Gerald Graff contends that schools and society have possibly overlooked numerous knowledgeable people by not being able to adapt and find a identify a common ground to enhance their intellectuality, one example being sports. Likewise by incorporating sports into their learning they may become engaged and excel academically. When this opportunity is missed people can be down casted as non-intellectual. However, later in life their background in sports can give them many gifted advantages like the ability to compete, argue and struggle in the adult workforce. In the article he contends what is intellectual to one may not be to another and our schools may be missing a huge opportunity to teach…

    • 122 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Albert Einstein once said “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it 's stupid”. As stated by one of the greatest minds of all time, every individual has the capacity to be an intellectual, but the way society currently measures intellect purely based off of one’s “book smarts” not everyone’s genius is fully realized. As stated by Gerald Graff In his essay “Hidden Intellectualism” Graff states that our current system of teaching does by no means try to foster the intelligence of street smart people who account for many in our society. In Graff’s experience he thinks that a style of teaching incorporating street smarts would have benefitted him and would benefit people today. If we tried to teach street smart people using topics they are interested they would be able to understand…

    • 1529 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Com/155 Week 6 Dq

    • 1011 Words
    • 5 Pages

    • Teachers and parents are concerned with whether standardized tests are a good indicator of a child's intelligence.…

    • 1011 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “The Trouble with Talent”, Kathy Seal, who frequently writes about children and education in magazines, wrote about the way of education in the U.S. which only focused on the value of inborn aptitude could breed children to become artful people and waste many of American children’s potential. At the beginning of this article, Seal told about an experiment of Jim Stigler, who was a UCLA psychologist, which tested the persistence of Japanese and American children by solving the math problem. While the American kids solved the problem for a short time and quickly gave up, the Japanese kids still kept on their work. Stigler stated that Asian education focused to the hard work which they believed that is one of the important factors to gain successful things. Whereas, Americans thought that achievement was produced by innate intelligence. Moreover, Stigler researched the math-test scores between American and Asian schools and realized that the scores of Asian school were higher than the scores of American schools as a result of working hard. Also, Seal asserted American education often assigned the curriculum according to children’s ability and reported that Jeff Howard, the social psychologist, president of the Efficacy Institute, Massachusetts, insisted, ““Kids always know who the teacher thinks is very smart, sorta smart and kinda dumb…The idea of genetic intellectual inferiority is rampant in American society…”” (p.212). However, Carol Dweck, a Columbia University psychologist, emphasized that it was dangerous when Americans thought geniuses are born rather than made because she realize that the kid who had believed “born smart” got bad test scores in her research. Also, considering intelligence as an innate ability would make children become quitters and afraid take difficult tasks. Because of getting more American genius, Seal argued that Americans shouldn’t focus to natural ability…

    • 924 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Guns Germs and Steel

    • 1055 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Diamond’s premise of this book was to attempt to answer Yali’s question and the inequalities of the world. The survey was presented in Guns, Germs and Steel by psychologists that gave “IQ” tests to black and white Europeans. The “IQ” tests were not accurate because people intelligence was defined differently. Some people intelligence…

    • 1055 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    e thesis of this article is that tests of intelligence d cognitive ability are cultural genres (Cole, 85; Greenfield, in press; Lave, 1986). This thesis is identified with a theoretical perspective that has come to be known as cultural psychology (Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1990; Price-Williams, 1980; Shweder, 1990; Stigler, Shweder, & Herdt, 1990). I develop this thesis by showing how ability tests presuppose a particular cultural framework. Most important, I demonstrate that this framework is not universally shared. Therefore, when it comes to tests of ability and intelligence, it is often the case that " y o u can't take it with you." There is, however, an alternative point of view, briefly summarized as " y o u can take it with you." This view, generally identified with a perspective called crosscultural psychology (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992; van de Vijver & Leung, 1997), is that ability tests are intrinsically transportable from one culture to another. With appropriate linguistic translation, administration by a "native" tester, and (less frequently) the provision of familiar content, the notion is that ability tests…

    • 10059 Words
    • 41 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Born First, Born Smarter?” Is an article about how the genetics and birth order of any said family affect intelligence. The two main contributors of the study are Robert Zajonc and Gregory Markus. Zajonc and Markus believed that birth order does, in fact, relate to intelligence. Their main questions were how and why the majority of first-born children typically test better and are smarter than their later-born siblings. Zajonc and Markus tested their theory by comparing it to the data of studies done by other researchers’. They analyzed the data from many research projects, one of which was IQ-like test administered in The Netherlands (the results were concluded by Lillian Belmont and Francis Marolla). Zajonc and Markus used their observations and findings to make an intellectual climate formula that measured how the overall intelligence level of a given family rose or fell concerning family size and birth order. The data from the Belmont-Marolla study was summarized in Zajonc and Markus’s intellectual climate model. The researchers also found that the age gap between children is related to intelligence. Zajonc and Markus…

    • 485 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When someone is called intelligent, people automatically think of how book smart someone is. Book smart relates to how much information about math, science, and english a person knows. In Hidden Intellectualism, Graff brings up the idea that intelligence isn’t all about a scholarly form of thinking. “Everyone knows some young person who is impressively “street smart” but does poorly in school” is the first line of Graff’s essay (Graff 787). Nowadays, it is popular for a person to have the experience and knowledge for an everyday environment but lack knowledge in educational studies. A reasonable answer for this problem could be that schools aren’t tapping into subjects other than the worn out academics that quickly in-interest students.…

    • 523 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Flynn Effect

    • 574 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In the United States between 1932 and 1978, mean IQ scores rose 13.8 points, or approximately 0.33 points each year (Flynn, 1984), and IQ scores continued to increase at least into the mid 1990s (Rowe & Rodgers, 2002). Even more striking increases in IQ scores were reported in other countries; for example, IQ scores in Great Britain surged 27 points between 1942 and 1992 (Flynn, 1999). Smaller increases were reported in numerous other countries (e.g., France, the Netherlands, and Norway) during shorter time periods (Flynn, 1987). The Flynn effect, as it is referred to by researchers, is supported by a growing body of research that indicates that even within relatively short timeframes, mean IQ scores tend to increase (Dickens & Flynn, 2001). Furthermore, the Flynn effect is not limited to developed countries (Daley, Whaley, Sigman, Espinosa, & Neumann, 2003). Meanwhile, research has identified numerous practical problems created by the Flynn effect. For example, rising scores require intelligence tests to be restandardized, which alters the scoring of tests such as the WAIS, and changes in test norms create difficulties in assessing the mental capacity of the mentally retarded (Tomoe & Ceci, 2003) and the elderly (Verhaeghen, 2003). Moreover, the Flynn effect may undermine the current theoretical concept of intelligence or the validity of intelligence tests (Flynn, 1984). Although numerous explanations for the Flynn effect were proposed (e.g., Dickens & Flynn, 2001; Flynn, 1987), debate on the origins of the Flynn effect continues (e.g., Rowe & Rodgers, 2002).…

    • 574 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    As the degree to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure, validity is a difficult property to evaluate in a test. Consider tests of intelligence. Many people are skeptical of the results of these tests. Some people are concerned that the tests measure only book learning and do not test common sense (Anastasi, 1988). Other people feel that intelligence tests have cultural, racial, and gender biases. Therefore, to conclude that a test is a valid measure of intelligence, it must be shown that the test measures intelligence independent of the test subjects education, culture, race, and sex.…

    • 2681 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Standardized testing is devised to measure an individual’s intelligence level or IQ. “In 1989, Professor Rushton of the University of Western Ontario claimed that human intelligence and behavior were largely determined by race, that Whites have bigger brains than Blacks, and that Blacks are more aggressive (Sue & Sue, 2008). The Bell Curve continues to stimulate a controversy that intelligence is inherited to a large degree and race is correlated with intellect. Proponents of Nature vs.…

    • 596 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In 1983 a professor of education at Harvard University, Dr. Howard Gardner, developed the theory of multiple intelligences. This theory states that there are eight different ways in which a person is intelligent. These different forms of intelligence are as follows: linguistic, or word smart; logical-mathematic, or reasoning/numbers smart; spatial, or picture smart; bodily-kinesthetic, or body smart; musical, or music smart; intrapersonal, or self-smart; and naturalist, or nature smart (“Multiple Intelligences” para. 1-2). It is not difficult to pinpoint which of these intelligences standardized testing primarily measures. For students who are not linguistically or mathematically gifted, the tests do not accurately show the students’…

    • 581 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Intellectual Power Paper

    • 1123 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “Intelligence includes the ability to reason abstractly, the ability to profit from experience, and the ability to adapt to varying environmental contexts” (Bee & Boyd, 2012, p. 167). Tests to measure intelligence were first developed in 1905 by Frenchmen, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon. The purpose of the tests was to measure these abilities to help children who difficulties in school. At that time, the French government began requiring all children to attend school, they wanted to be able to identify those with difficulties. The tests were made to measure skills that children would use in school “including measures of vocabulary, comprehension of facts and relationships, and mathematical and verbal reasoning” (Bee & Boyd, 2012, p. 167). The original tests developed by Binet and Simon were revised in 1916 and 1937 by Lewis Terman while at Stanford University. He wanted to revise the tests for children in the United States, and they were termed the Stanford-Binet tests. There were six different tests for different ages. When taking the test, the child would take the individual tests designed by age until he reached a test that he could not complete. A formula was used to determine the Intelligence Quotient (as known as IQ) of the child based on their scores. Binet and Simon compared the children’s actual chronological age to their “mental age” defined as “the age level of IQ test terms a child could successfully answer” (Bee & Boyd, 2012, p. 168). There have been revisions over the years in how IQ scores are calculated and today they are calculated by comparing a child’s score with that of children of the same age. There has been a need for changes in computing IQ scores because IQ scores have increased gradually over the last five decades. If a child today were to take the tests given in the early 1930s, he would score higher than the average of 100.…

    • 1123 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    McDevitt, T.M, Ormrod, J.E., Child Development and Education, (Sep 2007), p. 291-296., Merrill, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc.…

    • 586 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics