Here's the entire abstract:
Artificial Stupidity
The social rigging of intelligence cannot be limited to some film noir memory of communism projecting hostile fantasies upon capitalism. For the process of screening, testing, and sorting of intelligence carries the burden all by itself of a dreary and terrifying history. This is the history of a selective invention of stupidity which belongs to the registers of social injustice. There have been a few worthy articles devoted to uncovering the sad history of those discourses of psychiatry and psychology implicated in creating theses on heredity and the politics of social selection. The Intelligence Quotient system, as shown in Stephen J. Gould's work on the IQ test, is based on abusively exploited philosophical presuppositions.' What interests me most in terms of the markings and determinations that scar the young student body is the way scores were derived to undermine an entire class of pupils. The grades were construed to show that idiocy, in the testing lexicon, refers to the mental age of three or younger; the imbecile scored a mental age ranging between three and seven years of age. We owe the introduction of the moron to American psychologists, who derived the term from the Greek, to designate light debilitation, just below "average." The term was invented for use in the testing of immigrant children arriving in the United States. These morons were also defined as "incapable of dealing with their own affairs with ordinary intelligence or taking part in the struggle for survival" (Kantor 225). Graded and degraded, the little immigrant was from the start left back. It is important to bear in mind that the bureaucracy of shaming was based on the ideology of scientific testing. These tests at no point make an effort to theorize or even to describe their activity, nor do they try to explain why the "struggle to survive" would not belong to instinctual, inculcated, or partially stupid operations. What is it about survival that it should become a matter of aptitude or intelligence? This valuation, by the way, is a translation of the German notion, Lebensunfahigheit, designating an inaptitude for living. A preposterous axiom, when one considers those highly intelligent interlocutors who could not even survive, in some instances, as they continue to live. If one were to state the only possible ethical position, it would have to be this: I am stupid before the other. |