Fair Game

...tests...

...Aside from technical objections, many are offended by the tests because the results can be interpreted as suggesting not only that individuals are not equally "intelligent," but that some groups are less gifted than others in the qualities susceptible to measurement by I.Q...

...is pretty well settled at the moment of conception may still, if his heart is in the right place, find plenty of reasons for seeking to improve the child's living conditions, neighborhood or schools?though he may disagree with the thoroughgoing environmentalist on how to go about it...

...America has performed in its usual hit-and-miss manner...

...Arguments rage or, more often, sputter over the meaning of the word as applied to individuals, groups, opportunities for advancement, and rewards for effort...

...The fear has a basis in fact, particularly at a time when our new conservatives are constructing a philosophy around the "limits" of social policy...

...Ah, that phrase, "I.Q...

...Here the egalitarian argument, based on the realities of individual and group inequalities as well as social injustices, is straightforward and cogent...

...The employer who hires strictly by I.Q...

...test"-it's enough to send several schools of observers into a fit...

...Yet it is difficult to see how an incomes policy such as they envision could be enforced without a prodigious government effort and severe controls over a significant part of citizens' lives...

...There are many jobs, including quite a few reasonably well paying and unarduous ones, where a high I.Q...

...tests...

...would be a sore disadvantage...

...The coming of the principle of equality of reward would require nothing less than a revolution in the motives of the great majority of our people...

...Opportunity Everyone, regardless of political label, hails the ideal of equality of opportunity...

...In addition to their dismay at the notion of a babe's fate being settled in his genes, this group probably fears that legislators with little enthusiasm for social experiments will, like comfortably established Western followers of some Eastern religion, happily resign themselves to the belief that a man's destiny is unalterably fixed before he is born-so why bother tinkering with this and that...

...they sign manifestos against bugging and wiretapping and the like...

...Much of the promotion of Black Culture and Black English comes down to a means of baiting the middle class, a pleasure the not-so-poor champions of the poor, rather than the poor themselves, seem to enjoy most...

...Well, it is surely pleasanter, and kinder, to blame disagreeable symptoms on the society-which stands already convicted of any charge one cares to bring against it-than to pick on the genetic makeup of harmless infants...

...As for the many people who have been prevented from making it by native limitations, bad luck and the unfairness of our social arrangements, we scarcely know what to do...

...Rewards In our society, granted, college degrees have long been not so much measures of accomplishment as licenses for earnings-which brings us to the question of rewards...

...Some critics are able, more or less, to accept the inegalitarian test results as long as they are accompanied by a declaration, in italics, that an individual's low marks are attributable to the failures of the society, not to any inborn, inherited lack...

...It is from these possibly unwholesome facts of life, it seems to me, that proposals to deal with inequality must start...

...Still, if one wants slum youths to enter college and join the professions, then one ought to resist celebrating the street culture of the slums as an alternative to reading and writing English in its generally used form...

...The Socialist vision has always been of a society whose citizens are joined in a community of interest rather than fragmented by competitive pressures...

...With so little equality in life, what higher function can there be for a humane state than to repair or at least diminish the inequalities of birth and upbringing...

...tests as being culture-bound also demanding equal access to the fruits of that culture for those who have difficulty contributing to it...

...Lacking an Honors List, we give our bounty in the form of cold cash and leave the selection to the mass audience and the arms of commerce...

...They differ in every imaginable way, from the size of their biceps to the keenness of their eyesight, from their sense of pitch to how well they make out on I.Q...

...Others allow that they might tolerate the tests if only they could be made less "culture bound"-that is, if it could be arranged that children who have the misfortune to be illiterate and ignorant could score as well as those who can read and add...

...Our egalitarians look to government to institute an incomes policy that will modify the highs and the lows, and permit the laborer and the banker to lie down in more equal, though probably still separate, beds...

...And whatever the truth of the case, why deny ourselves a measure of hope that some amelioration of the conditions of the poor, some innovation in our schools, some increase of enlightenment in the society at large, may afford more chances to more youths...

...Further, most people in most societies respond most energetically to the promise of material rewards and pay unremitting attention to how their rewards compare with those of the Jones's...

...Though I am as offended as the next liberal by the discrimination imbedded in society and the arbitrariness of life, I am enough a product of this place and time to enjoy the variety of it all and to be put off by what I know of societies where officialdom sets the values and prices the talents...

...Opponents of the tests react in a number of ways...

...All societies, including the ones that go by the name of Socialist, deal with inequalities by finding ways of rewarding the putatively successful and consoling the unsuccessful...

...In truth, I am not sure how much in the way of egalitarianism I could stand...

...For obvious reasons, any discussion of this matter is certain to end in name-calling...

...This, of course, forces us back to the young person's native abilities-and both champions and critics of I.Q...

...People are entitled to a decent life not because of any attributes owed to good breeding or good luck but simply because they are human beings...

...Some would like to hang or at least boycott all testgivers and publicists...

...Furthermore, the attraction of any job ought to reside in the satisfactions of the work rather than in the size of the paycheck, and there is something deeply unhealthy about a system whose participants, hustling after the buck and shoving each other around in the process, care less how they spend their lives than how they spend their earnings...

...Now, our egalitarians are also by and large libertarians...

...On this matter of equality of opportunity, we find the same critics who disdain the I.Q...

...After all, even the Congressman-philosopher who decides that an individual's I.Q...

...Everyone declares on all fitting occasions that no matter what a child's birth, he or she ought to have a fair chance of getting on in the world...

...Should a test be devised on which "disadvantaged" groups could do better than the currently advantaged, these critics would at once be converted...

...More than we now have, certainly-but we will not get very far toward changing what exists by pretending that inequality is an invention of I.Q...

...tests may be laying more weight on the test results than they can bear...

...It is not just a question of material benefits...

...And there are many jobs where intelligence is only one of several desirable qualities, and not the most import-ant...

...They can, if pressed on this point, remind us that stupidity and incompetence have not typically prevented the offspring of the well-to-do from finding a more or less comfortable place in some business or office...

...and they may even detect a certain hypocrisy among those who today oppose open admission to college for academically deprived black and Puerto Rican youths, but who never criticized athletic scholarships or the influence of alumni fat cats in getting their dim kids into alma mater...

...Thus, superathletes and superentertainers are showered with wealth, and everybody grumbles about the hourly rate of plumbers...

...score is likely to wind up with a highly discontented and inefficient work force...

...testers...

...That many attitudes and conditions may be changed over time, I have no doubt-but they are not often abolished by ideological preferences...

...We are continually undertaking programs that are hailed as "breakthroughs" until they break down or do not live up to their advertising, then we blame the failure on those who fail, and go back to the football game...

...To be sure, colleges can be converted into laboratories of "relevance," with every entrant getting his or her degree for managing to stay alive through four years-but that is likely to have a greater impact on the degree than on the student...

...If people are equal in the eyes of the law and perhaps in God's eyes, from most other viewpoints they are grossly unequal, and no amount of boycotting can make it otherwise...

...Since revolutions of this kind rarely occur spontaneously, the encouragement of correct behavior would be left in the foreseeable future to bureaucrats and policemen, not a prospect to bring joy to libertarians...

...To begin with the individual, most of us have noticed that people are far from equal...