'Intelligence' Testing

Children whose environment is not school orientated — those from lower class backgrounds — tend to do poorly in school and therefore tend to wind up on the bottom of the social hierarchy. This does not mean they are less intelligent than those who succeed in school. These school failures have a deep knowledge of their social and physical environment, and they display great ability at getting-by in it. They do not understand that their environment at school does not deal in that, and it deprives them of the opportunity to find someone to help them achieve this understanding.

Most so-called slow learners, for example, display great ability in breaking school rules. For them it is easy to get to their lockers between period without getting caught. They know all about the things to be found in the hills around their valley. Some children from farming backgrounds are academically clueless, but there isn't anything they can't tell you about baling hay. If baling hay were the sole criterion for judging IQ then many of our 'brightest' minds would be morons.

Of course, these impressions about the intelligence of the failures in our school system cannot be proven; our way of testing intelligence is very academic, relying on word skill and mathematical logic. An indication of the discrimination inherent in these tests is shown by the fact that children of teachers do better than any other group in them.