School Section 17 Yarmouth sat on the King's Highway No. 4, one mile south of St. Thomas and since we lived about 10 feet outside the city limits we could not attend the city public school which was much closer. Here, in the fourth grade, in the year 1948, I heard for the first time about intelligence and IQ scores.
1) Nobody knew the difference between a low score and a high one.
2) Someone, somewhere, had already determined that it was better not to know these scores.
3) Just knowing these scores could be bad.
4) A high score was not always good and a low score was not always bad.
5) Nobody could explain how the same questions could appear on an IQ test that appear on reading tests.
6) IQ scores and language skills were distributed according to a bell-shaped curve among the population.
7) Anyone who spent too much time worrying about this could end up accross the road (psychiatric hospital).
8) Therefore, nobody in our class would be told their scores, and we were not about to be told the scores of anyone else.
By this time I was familiar with stories of the discovery of the new world, circumnavigation of the planet, circulation of blood and the problems encountered by the likes of Darwin and Galileo in presenting new ideas and concepts. Therefore, at the age of ten, while the fellow behind me was still having some difficulty with phonetics as a concept relating to Dick, Jane and Spot, the following thoughts ocurred. Something unusually important is being hidden here, George Porge. What you have been told does not make sense. Never forget it. In 1966, after I had worked for ten years, married and become a father, I was told that I could outscore 97% of the population on English language proficiency tests or I.Q. tests. In 1980, I joined Mensa. I learned these things at the first function I attended.
1) Nobody knew of a single successful job applicant where the employer was aware of the applicant's status as a Mensan.
2) High intelligence was the only condition known to man to be viewed as worse than homosexuality by the general population.
3) The typical new Mensan attended 4 social functions and was never seen or heard from again.
Despite a considerable interest in these matters, I found as a new member of Mensa that socializing as an enjoyable pastime was completely alien to my nature. It was definitely not the socializing that kept me paying my dues. Only curiosity about the reactions of others to my writing, kept me around.
In 1985 desperately thrashing around for interesting work, I paid $4500 for a computer course. Poof, I was suddenly sitting in classrooms, listening to talking educators all day and trying to make sense of their ghastly books at night, yet again. In short order my inability to memorize string constants had been shoved 8 feet up my nose. My presentation skills in front of crowds were by now non-existant. Despite some 10 years as assistant manager of a bank installment loan office, I needed remedial lessons in business arithmetic on weekends. The computerized learning programs had obviously required millions of dollars in education grants to standardize, but had overlooked a few things.
1) A mental age of 10.8 is not always superior to all other possiblities.
2) Excellent communicators really do use the language skills of children. Where does that leave those who read and write?
By the third month of this course my ability to memorize the utterances of educators fell off the scale along with their incomprehensible books. I was given a refund of $1000 and sent home. I found a job as a laborer in a factory, and, naturally, was reprogramming their payroll two years later on their mainframe computer.
How to increase the membership of Mensa is a matter of considerable interest and I have given this a lot of thought. It seems to me that the concept of IQ contributes little to the planet except to blur the distinction between literacy and schizophrenia.
In order to understand Mensa, we have first to understand the nature of an average and a high IQ score. Imagine, if you will, two rooms, one filled with IQs of 100, the other filled, not with Mensans, but with people with high IQs. It should be easy to distinguish which is which. One group talks all the time and the other reads.
Now then. Let us imagine a third room full of Mensans. Guys. Do I really have to tell ya?

This item by George Noviss was included in Montage, June 2001, the Mensa newsletter for Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener/Waterloo, London, Windsor/Sarnia

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