Elsevier

Medical Hypotheses

Volume 73, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 273-277
Medical Hypotheses

Editorial
Replacing education with psychometrics: How learning about IQ almost-completely changed my mind about education

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2009.04.011Get rights and content

Summary

I myself am a prime example of the way in which ignorance of IQ leads to a distorted understanding of education (and many other matters). I have been writing on the subject of education – especially higher education, science and medical education – for about 20 years, but now believe that many of my earlier ideas were wrong for the simple reason that I did not know about IQ. Since discovering the basic facts about IQ, several of my convictions have undergone a U-turn. Just how radically my ideas were changed has been brought home by two recent books: Real Education by Charles Murray and Spent by Geoffrey Miller. Since IQ and personality are substantially hereditary and rankings (although not absolute levels) are highly stable throughout a persons adult life, this implies that differential educational attainment within a society is mostly determined by heredity and therefore not by differences in educational experience. This implies that education is about selection more than enhancement, and educational qualifications mainly serve to ‘signal’ or quantify a person’s hereditary attributes. So education mostly functions as an extremely slow, inefficient and imprecise form of psychometric testing. It would therefore be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one. I now advocate a substantial reduction in the average amount of formal education and the proportion of the population attending higher education institutions. At the age of about sixteen each person could leave school with a set of knowledge-based examination results demonstrating their level of competence in a core knowledge curriculum; and with usefully precise and valid psychometric measurements of their general intelligence and personality (especially their age ranked degree of Conscientiousness). However, such change would result in a massive down-sizing of the educational system and this is a key underlying reason why IQ has become a taboo subject. Miller suggests that academics at the most expensive, elite, intelligence-screening universities tend to be sceptical of psychometric testing; precisely because they do not want to be undercut by cheaper, faster, more-reliable IQ and personality evaluations.

Introduction

It was only in early 2007 that I began properly to engage, for the first time in my professional career, with the literature on IQ. Surprisingly, this engagement had been stimulated by a book of economic history. And learning the basic facts about IQ rapidly changed my views on many things, none more so than education.

Just how radically my ideas about education were changed by learning about IQ has been brought home by two recent books: Real Education By Charles Murray [1] and Spent by Geoffrey Miller [2]. In line with analyses of Murray and Miller, I would now repudiate many of my previous opinions on the subject, and advocate a substantial reduction in the average amount of formal education and the proportion of the population attending higher education. In general, I now believe that many years of formal education can and should be substantially (but not entirely!) replaced with ‘psychometric’ measures of intelligence and personality as a basis for evaluating career potential.

In this article I use my own experience as a case study of the potentially-disruptive influence of psychometric knowledge, and discuss further the reasons why basic IQ facts have been so effectively concealed, confused and denied by mainstream elite intellectual opinion in the UK and USA.

Section snippets

The importance of IQ

I have been writing on the subject of education for about 20 years (especially on higher education, science and medical education), but I now believe that much of what I wrote was wrong for the simple reason that I did not know about IQ. Personality traits are important in a similar way to IQ, however personality measurement is currently less reliable and valid than IQ testing, and less-well quantified.

In the early 2000s I argued that modern formal education should be directed primarily at

Policy implications of psychometrics

If psychometric measures of IQ and personality were available, then it would be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one. However, such change would result in a massive down-sizing of the educational system – with substantial and permanent loss of jobs and status for educational professionals of all types including teachers, professors, administrators and managers.

According to Geoffrey Miller’s analysis [2], this impact

Four mistaken beliefs resulting from my lack of IQ knowledge

I will summarize under four heading my main pre-IQ errors regarding education.

Mistaken belief number 1: Modern formal education should be directed primarily at inculcating the ability to think abstractly and systematically [3].

Revision: Modern formal education should be directed primarily at inculcating specific knowledge content.

Abstract systematic thinking is exceptionally important in modern societies. And I used to believe that that abstract systematic thinking was mostly a product of

Measuring personality

The main unsolved problem for this psychometric approach is the evaluation of personality. Most of the current evidence for the predictive and explanatory power of personality comes from self-rating questionnaires, and clearly these would not be suitable for educational and job evaluations since it is facile to learn the responses which would lead to a high rating for Conscientiousness.

Rather than being simply asserted in a questionnaire, a Conscientious, persevering, self-disciplined

Conclusions

I have previously written about the extraordinary way in which knowledge of IQ in particular, and psychometrics in general, is ‘hidden in plain sight’ in modern culture [17]. The basic facts about IQ are accessible, abundant and convincing for those who take the trouble to look; but modern mainstream intellectual culture has for around half a decade ‘immunized’ most educated people against looking-at or learning about IQ by multiple forms of misinformation and denigration [22], [23].

The recent

Acknowledgements

“A Farewell to Alms: a brief economic history of the world” by Gregory Clark (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA, 2007) was the book of economic history which first stimulated my (belated) engagement with the scientific literature of intelligence and personality. The web pages of Steve Sailer have since provided both an invaluable introduction and also a higher education in the subject (e.g. www.isteve.com/Articles_IQ.htm).

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