"Men, it has been well said, think in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." From the 1852 preface to 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' by Charles MacKay, LL.D.
Let us now consider the possibility that "intelligence quotients" or "IQ scores" may represent the single greatest catastrophic failure of human reason and understanding since hundreds of thousands were offered up to the delusion of witchcraft.
Why do we have IQ scores? Why not measures of vocabulary recognition such as comprehension --- 6000 words which is more or less normal vs. the 90,000 of duller Mensans? Why is a civilization that can put people into space incapable of measuring the reading skills of children? Thousands of reading research studies are undertaken every year, only to shine and twinkle briefly before they are lost and forgotten.
Surely we can grasp that some 15,000,000 Canadians are brighter and more literate than the person who represents the average citizen.
Ecclesiastes noted that "The race is not to the swift."
McLuhan noticed that "The medium is the message."
Yet North American school boards are united in ignoring the most basic laws of language, regularly referring to mediocrity as "excellent communications skills," and pushing forward as though the most literate half of the population does not exist.
Mediocre vocabularies are superior to all other possibilities in sales, business and politics because it is important to be widely understood.
It seems to me that:
. Educators squandered an entire decade of my life by making me sit listening to teachers talk on and on when I preferred to learn by reading books.
. The last thing this world needs is "children's books."
. Most school textbooks are written to the preferences of semi-literate committees.
. The hiring committees of government and business are using the same assumptions and preferences as television audiences.
. They are hiring immigrants instead of their own children, rather than acknowledging their own mediocrity.
The distribution of vocabulary recognition follows a bell shaped curve. It should be obvious that for the pursuit of success alone no education beyond the fourth grade is necessary.
Likewise, it should be obvious that the same twisted sciences that give us education, also invent the mental disorders that are attributed to those who are unable to find employment, food and reasonable accommodation.
Educators never seem to seriously consider that what they expect of their students, only semi-literate mediocrities do well in the first place - first order listening and memorization. Educators never seem to realize that most of us spend our lives working for semi-literate bosses and supervisors while surrounded by semi-literate coworkers. There is no way to know how many of the very literate have tried to be teachers with the best of intentions, only to give up in the face of near idiot level assumptions and supervision. Something like $50 billion is spent every year in Canada to make each succeeding generation as ignorant, stupid and illiterate as the last. Truly ungodly sums are wasted to repair the damage in factories and businesses caused by not knowing who can read and who cannot.
More than half of the population of Toronto, Canada has been replaced with immigrants in less than 40 years in the quest to avoid noticing that our employers avoid applicants who can read and write.
Such is the national obsession with mediocrity that education may now be the art or science of not knowing who can read and write.
Most of our medium message addicts insist that the brightest people on the planet talk and listen incessantly without ever reading anything at all.



This item by George Noviss was included in Montage March 2004, The Mensa Newsletter for Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener/Waterloo, London, Windsor/Sarnia

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