JS can’t find Mensa’s web site:
What evidence do you have to support Mensa’s position on the SAT/IQ correlation? Linda Gottfredson seems to believe that teachers have an above average IQ. I am also highly suspicious of the SAT/IQ correlation as is La Griffe. Moreover, to suggest an average teacher IQ of 91 puts 20 points between Mensa and a full-time world renown intelligence researcher.I am sure that school teachers are not as smart as physicians or mathematicians. However, I know that many women enter the teaching profession because of a desire to help children. Rather than blaming teachers for their collective poor performance, better to blame the socialist system that allows it to happen. In the past you have quoted Mises. Why not adopt the “give no quarter” Austrian philosophy? Blame the teachers and you miss a chance to identify to the public the governing dynamic behind our terrible schools.
The evidence is sort of hard to miss. Mensa has a minimum IQ requirement, and as evidence that one meets it, the organization accepts your pre-1994 SATs as “an approved intelligence test that has been properly administered and supervised.” This is, in fact, its only entrance requirement. In the case of this particular test, a score of 1250 or higher is required which equates to an IQ of 130. This is 39 points higher than the AVERAGE education major, not 20, which makes me wonder if perhaps JS might be an education major himself. And of course, the AVERAGE score says nothing about the intelligence of an INDIVIDUAL teacher… except that in the case of a highly intelligent one, there is at least one and probably more sub-normal intelligences to counterbalance her.
I also don’t see what JS’s point about women entering the teaching profession because of a desire to help children has to do with anything. The point is that the low intelligence of the average teacher completely explodes the notion of leaving education to the so-called professionals.
Finally, JS reveals that he hasn’t paid much attention to my previous columns on education. I have criticized government involvement in it many times, but teachers too often escape criticism for their willing, often enthusiastic, involvement in a corrupt, destructive system. The reality is that they are demonstrably, in the aggregate, an overpaid, underachieving, low-IQ lot complicit in the intellectual destruction of America’s children.
As for Linda Gottfredson, the evidence suggests she’s wrong. Furthermore, she’s a professor at the University of Delaware’s School of Education. I’m sure a lot of car salesmen will tell you that car buyers have above-average IQs… at least in public.