origin Years ago and lost in a fog of educator's yakety-yak, I can remember thinking that something was significantly wrong with the situation before me. Every possible way of ensuring the primacy of mediocrity seemed to have been thought of. We were not allowed to read in class. The teacher was always talking. The purpose of making my own notes eluded me. The point of memorizing what was written in a book eluded me. The connection between academics and sports eluded me. The excessive fondness of educators for grand yakathons and sundry motor mouths irritated me. The educator's world still ran on mouth power as though the written word did not yet exist. The possibility that I might even discover universal truths as fixed in logic and reason as those of Kepler's laws of planetary motion or Assimov's laws of futurics to apply to the moronic behavior of my high school teachers rose before me. For the next twenty years, however, I narrowed the focus of my recreational thinking time to two apparent absurdities.
1) How inflation rates match interest rates everywhere in the known universe.
2) How the most intelligent match the most literate everywhere in the known universe.
As luck would have it, I was ideally placed to monitor the first question, assistant manager of a bank. Yet nothing, not even failing grade ten English or being fired by three employers has quite impressed me so much as learning from a bank's psychological survey that I could read unusually well and therefore qualified as a social misfit. At 27 years of age the window of opportunity through which I might have become a famous rocket scientist had now closed and success and happiness were exceedingly unlikely to find me according to the examiner. Even so, he wished me luck and shared one final thought. Stay away from sales. Insanity could otherwise be my lot. For reasons not readily apparent to him, success in sales virtually always pointed to an IQ of 100.
Before long the urge to escape the lunacy of the Ontario Ministry of Education drove me to find another job. A few months later we were living in the golden state of California and I was working for another bank.
By and by the time went by. We saw Disneyland, four or five times. We saw San Francisco, San Diego, La Jolla, Sepulveda Blvd and El Camino Real. I canvassed for the Heart Fund on Rodeo Drive and cooked hamburgers for the Santa Monica Jaycees. My wife was a makeup model for 2 minutes on a TV show. We donated two hours of our busy lives as part of the validation audience for a couple of soap commercials.
Then one day, it happened. I was staring out the front window on a fine Saturday morning and a thought, out of nowhere, whizzed betwixt my ears. Literacy and intelligence are the same thing.
For a free color postcard of the bell-shaped curve send mailing address to George Noviss (http://www.gnoviss.com).



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