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February « 2009 «

February 19, 2009

Childhood Intelligence

Filed under: Student's Rights, Youth Rights — Tags: , , , , — Adamantaimai @ 12:01 am

Recently, I’ve been giving some thought to the capabilities of the human mind and the meaning of intelligence. The common perception is that human intelligence grows as we age, that young children start off stupid and it is adults’ job, through the various institutions of education, to implant the right “knowledge” into children’s brains until they’re intelligent like us. I think that’s very, very far from the truth.

 

If you’ve read Dr. Robert Epstein’s “The Case Against Adolescence,” you may remember, in his chapter on intelligence, his description of two studies conducted in the 1940s, one by David Wechsler and one by J. C. Raven, demonstrating that “intelligence,” to the extent that it is measured by one’s capacity to score highly on an IQ test, peaks in the early- to mid-teens. Our IQ remains relatively constant throughout our lives, because IQ is a measure of how well we scored on the test compared to everyone else the same age as us. But, according to Wechsler and Raven, raw scores on “intelligence tests” rise rapidly during childhood, peak between the ages of 13 and 16, and decline steadily thereafter.

 

But raw scores on IQ tests do not measure intelligence. They measure how closely our “mental model of reality,” as educator John Holt puts it, conforms to actual reality, or at least societally perceived reality. Some portions of intelligence tests measure social knowledge; others measure the capacity to perform mathematical calculations mentally; others measure one aspect of memory or another, or our ability to put things in sequence.

 

But this is not real intelligence. Real intelligence is our ability to construct our mental model of reality from the ground up, to absorb information from the world around us, the individual bits of which may not make any sense by themselves, and to detect patterns in it, to analyze it, to fit the bits and pieces into a coherent whole and use them to further our understanding of the world. Not nearly as easy a task as writing symbols beneath their corresponding numerals as quickly as possible, one of the tasks of many IQ tests.

 

According to Wechsler and Raven, intelligence peaks in our teens. But I think that real intelligence peaks much earlier. In fact, I think it peaks between the ages of 1 and 3. Certainly, after the age of 5, when children generally enter school, real intelligence declines sharply, and continues to decline throughout life, or at least never increases.

(more…)

February 17, 2009

Youth Criminalized, Controlled & Commoditized Says Giroux

A great new commentary from Henry Giroux about the criminalization of youth and the conspicuous absence of concern for youth in our growing economic crisis and recovery efforts.

A good read. Some of the juciest bits:

Increasingly, children seem to have no standing in the public sphere as citizens and as such are denied any sense of entitlement and agency. Children have fewer rights than almost any other group, and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs. This is not to suggest that adults do not care about youth, but most of those concerns are framed within the realm of the private sphere of the family and can be seen most clearly in the moral panics mobilized around drugs, truancy and kids killing each other.

And:

As the protocols of governance become indistinguishable from military operations and crime-control missions, youth are more and more losing the protections, rights, security or compassion they deserve in a viable democracy. The model of policing that now governs all kinds of social behaviors constructs a narrow range of meaning through which young people define themselves. Moreover, the rhetoric and practice of policing, surveillance and punishment have little to do with the project of social investment and a great deal to do with increasing powerful modes of regulation, pacification and control - together comprising a “youth control complex” whose prominence in American society points to a state of affairs in which democracy has lost its claim and the claiming of democracy goes unheard.

As if hearing such a forceful defense of youth from one of the foremost advocates of our cause wasn’t enough to make my day, I noticed he also quoted me. Very cool.

February 3, 2009

Big Business:Ageist

Filed under: Curfews & Status Offenses, Uncategorized — shesarebel @ 10:17 pm

The other day I was perusing the aisles of Wal-Mart, walking though the aisles until I found my self in an aisle filled with vitamins and supplements. I wasn’t looking for anything but I looked around anyways, and something caught my attention.  Right at eye level, there was a bright orange package reading “One-a-day Teen Advantage for her” right next to the women’s One-a-day. Wondering if there was even a difference between the ‘teen’ and the ‘normal’ vitamin, I stopped to pick it up and inspect the package. It had all the good stuff that vitamins have, vitamin A, B, vitamins to make your hair shiny, bones strong, etcetera. The normal One-a-day Women’s multi-vitamin, was priced a full 2 dollars cheaper and sold in larger quantities.

“Now, what would make such a price difference?” I wondered.

(more…)

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