It seems rather likely to me now, that from the early years of the twentieth century until the present, attempts to reach a consensus for literacy standards have been stumbling headlong into a politically unacceptable fact. Successful people tend to score slightly below eleven-year-olds on objective tests. Therefore, the monkeys are still in charge of the zoo, so to speak.
Politicians, school board trustees, corporation executives and super-salesmen, in general, are not bright or literate people. A mediocre level of vocabulary is an occupational prerequisite for these positions. The race is not to the swift. The medium is still the message. The secretaries to whom they dictate their letters tend to have higher objective scores.
For one hundred years these mega-morons have made honest reading scores into secrets and filled the resulting information vacuum with all manner of self-serving claptrap about giftedness, mental disorders and intelligence quotients at taxpayers expense. Five hundred years after the first printing press, students still sit in classrooms and listen for weeks and months to learn what can be discovered in an afternoon by reading a book.
IQ scores are a horror story and a complete list of their evil effects on this world will eventually need not just one book but a complete encyclopedia. Several volumes will be needed to describe how the lack of literacy standards turn schools and universities into lunatic asylums and playgrounds for happy immigrants. Several more to describe how the need for ungodly quantities of alcohol and drugs is created as a matter of course. Then we’ll need to list the suicides, murders, robberies that result from this misguided attempt to protect the self-esteem of our most eminent and distinguished citizens. Over the course of one century the death toll could easily outstrip the casualties of the first and second world wars, but one or two volumes should suffice for the law-enforcement officers killed and injured in the struggle to supervise the crazed druggies and alcoholics.
For centuries and for obviously practical reasons, the female of our species has preferred a successful mate, inadvertently establishing the half-wit as the truly masculine man and creating problems for those who learn to read and write. In some quarters to this very day, people of African descent are considered to be intellectually inferior to whites. At least one book of our encyclopedia will be needed to bear on the probability that they as capable of literacy as any other member of the human race. However, the story of how Africans came to outnumber the original North Americans also remains to be told.
For one hundred years, anyone judged superior by the hiring committees of the English speaking world, has tended to score below eleven-year-olds on language proficiency tests. The widespread and ongoing practice of continuously replacing the population of cities with non-English speaking immigrants could be adjusted or touched up. For instance we may find our society is more productive with an honest education system while forty percent of the population dig holes and another forty percent fills them in again.
Finally, then, the story of Mensa will be told. How school board trustees convinced an entire planet that people who learn to read at all well, are born mentally gifted, even those who learn to read well, themselves, frequently many years after they are physically born. How the populations of entire cities and countries were replaced over and over again to match the fantasies of bug brains and so on and so forth. Most of all, how the super literate themselves came to perceive normalcy (yakkety-yak and canasta and all) as the way we all should be.
This item by George Noviss was included in Montage, September 2005, The Mensa Newsletter for Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener/Waterloo, London, Windsor/Sarnia
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