Shenk dispels the idea of cultural superiority in chapter 6. I thought this was of great relevance to our school because there’s not a day where I don’t hear some stereotype about some ethnicity being tied to some level of intelligence. I’m not going to go into specifics, but we as a school like to attribute one’s intelligence to their race. One nationality specifically report having their own grading scale. An “A” for one person may be surprising or expected just based on race alone. I think Shenk’s point that there is “roughly 10 times more genetic variation within large populations than there is between populations” (Shenk 106). We need to stop justifying our own faults with external ideas like “oh, they’re just smarter than me because they’re (fill in the blank).” Like Shenk repeats numerous times, we often make excuses so we don’t have to face our shortcomings. We make it seem like our deficiency in intelligence is out of our control. Really, we’re just making excuses.” All human beings are descended from the same African ancestors” (Shenk 106) and we are more similar than we think. Therefore, cultural superiority or inferiority is, besides invalid, insulting.
Gabriella Veytsel (geminizire@hotmail.com)
Society uses cultural standards to measure intellegence because of the on going human goal of placing people and things we dont understand fully into categories and dividing them up so that we can better understand them. The IQ test and standardized testing are basically used for that. Along with tracing progress on an extremely limited basis. Standardized testing and intellegence are measured so that either a school or an area can track their progress. This does have to do with economic opportunities to attend better education or an easier home life by not having to work or the stresses of a disconnected family.
ReplyDeleteThis connects to the idea of IQ test's scores being different for different ethnicities and how it can not be accepted univerally. Race has been seen as having a part in the economic opportunities of some people. This is not a broad generalization. This has been shown that " Of the more than 13.4 million families with children living on incomes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, 30 percent are Hispanic, 22 percent are black or African American, and 6 percent are other nonwhites." This is a real statistic that shows that lower economic opportunities can result in a lower education therefore a lower IQ.
The idea of biological interdependence of nature is related to this becasue it shows a benefit to being able to live in a better neighborhood and having the opportuinity to attend better schools. The people depend on a better enviornment to live in so that they can biologically prosper.
Source: http://www.urban.org/publications/411936.html
Hannah Perl (hannahperl94@gmail.com)
Using an excuse like race is a lot easier than facing the truth. Like mentioned above, it is easier and more effective to group people and then keep track of progress. Another way to look it is how Gabriella mentioned above that it is easier to use culture as an excuse. Culture strongly influence a person because they grow up in a specific environment where ideals and values are specific to that group of people. The expectations are different for each culture and because of that it reflects how students respond when asked about their intelligence. They find an easy response that because they are not one type of race they cannot be smart.
ReplyDeleteIt is true, like mentioned above, that the socioeconomic status strongly affects the outcomes of the IQ tests. What else should not be forgotten is the amount of people that take the IQ test from the economical status. Consider the fact that when families are struggling would they spend their money to a see a doctor to have their child’s intelligence number given back to them with just a number? When they are asked to take an IQ tests I am sure it’s for health reasons that there might be something wrong, but it wouldn’t be done just to prove how smart their children are. The reason for why people are taking the IQ tests might be the reason why the IQ numbers are lower for the races like Hispanic and African American because the people who take the tests might not be as smart.
I think that an IQ test cannot be universal because there are too many factors that would prevent this from happening. One is that everyone might be intelligent in their own way like how to farm and survive instead of being able to solve three-variable calculus problems. Howard Gardner came up with the theory that there is more than one certain kind of intelligence, which would make it hard to measure an IQ level accurately and then judge the person because of that number (http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm). Personally I believe that a universal IQ tests would be hard to do because each culture has its own language and the IQ test might not be able to transform to correctly test the intelligence levels of that certain culture.
In a certain chapter, Shenk talked about how during the Renaissance there were many great artists because of the strong competition. If a society is isolated it would have little purpose to actually succeed and further their intelligence. Unless competition is strongly advised then the society would place an emphasis on becoming a better individual to beat somebody else. This relates to the theme of interdependence through the fact that for a society to become better it needs a strong incentive or competition to make that happen. In a community in the forest, competition means that two species are fighting over the same resources to survive (Campbell 1199). But this is different for societies in the way that they are competing over the glory of the better culture. The source of glory will never be gone so the fight could continue for decades. Look at the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. Because of the strong competition to become smarter and send a man to the moon, the United States had a strong incentive to achieve this goal. The new technology and creations that came out of that time period changed the world forever. If a society is isolated there will not be a strong need to “to foster a culture of excellence” (Shenk 144).
Ayana Dambaeva (adambaeva@gmail.com)