>"Intelligence" is a notoriously elusive quality, anyway. We know it when we
>see it, and we know from our everyday experience that some people are
>brighter than others, but it's very hard to pin down and define. I would
>provisionally accept the notion that IQ scores at least "point to" something
>"real," but they are an extremely crude measure. SAT scores are even worse,
>correlating most closely with family income. These supposedly "objective"
>tests should not have nearly the weight that they do in determining people's
>life chances.
>
I wouldn't even provisionally accept _that_ much for IQ. Remember, Binet
developed the IQ test not as a measure of any innate quality, but to
determine which students of his needed a bit of extra tutelage, and for
which topics. It was the American eugenics movement that seized upon the
use of these tests as a measure of a hypothetical "trait" of
intelligence; they wanted to breed humans for a better society, but they
needed a trait to breed _for_. In fact, this notion of a single, unitary
trait of intelligence has been suprseded by nearly a century of
cognitive science research. For example, Howard Gardner's hypothesis of
"multiple intelligences" is based on more recent work in cognitive science.
The common analogy used to explain why IQ tests are so crude is as follows. Imagine if we took athletes, and measured how well they do in a battery of athletic tasks-- the shot-put, long-distance swimming, the 10-yard sprint, archery, boxing and pole-vaulting. And we took their performances on these, scaled them numerically, and combined these scores (summed, averaged, whatever) to create an "athletic quotient" for each athlete. Now, this scale might be of _some_ use, and one could probably create no end of statistical analyses with this scale. But it's an artifact: it doesn't measure a single _trait_ that can be called "athletic ability." (Note also that I chose athletic tasks that are radically different from one another.)
IQ tests-- and the SATs, which are pretty much an IQ test, as far as structure is concerned-- do measure certain abilities, but these are abilities that are acquired and developed through years of schooling and practice. They can be very useful, and not just to measure schooling; for example, one way of demonstrating the impact of tetraethyl lead in a given environment is to demonstrate depressed SAT scores in that region. They measure the combined results of environment and development, and one can informally speak of a single trait of "intelligence." But as far as innate potential is concerned, this notion of a single, unitary trait of intelligence has been superseded by nearly a century of cognitive science research.
>Joanna's original remark that got me thinking about this, though, had to do
>with how social practices and institutions that might seem to reflect some
>"objective" reality ("expensive colleges with a lot of inherited social
>prestige deserve their status because the kids who go there and the faculty
>who teach them are smarter and better") in fact serve to reproduce and
>perpetuate unjust and irrational class structures and class domination.
>
There's only a slight basis for such a claim. For one thing, kids from
well-off families tend to have been better nourished during their
development, there's also a higher incidence of earlier schooling. So
kids from wealthy and powerful families may have a better-than-average
degree of intelligence-- but as we all know, that's no guarantee that
they're going to be wiser, or more humane, or take certain important
things into account when forming opinions, or that they're going to be
any freer of ideology than anyone else. I've know people of considerable
intelligence who are, frankly, blind to a lot of important issues, and
can use complex reasoning and lots of facts to come up with utterly
nonsensical opinions.