7. June 2009 by student.

Education is supposed to be one of the key to success. Education is used to be a ticket out of poverty, now is part of the system that traps people in the underclass. School tuitions are increasing all the time. According to USA TODAY, this year, schools in several states are raising tuitions by 10% to more than 15 %, adding hundreds of dollars to students’ cost especially in college that inhibits a lot of people to get a degree. The higher education a person have, the better opportunity for them to get a higher paid  jobs, and to have a better life. In a modern society, a child who never learns to read adequately, much less to add and subtract, to write, to think logically, and creatively will never be able to lead a fully human life. He/She will be left behind by the rest of the society. In order for them to go to college, they have to work more hours, sacrifice not seeing their family more often and they need to cut back some of their expenses such as ; food, clothing, restaurant, and family vacations. Most student get a student loan in able for them to finance some of the tuition fees, books, and school necessities, that will put them more in trouble, and in debt.                     According to former Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich, as many as one third of the nations 40 million schools, aged children are at risk of either failing, dropping out, or falling victim to crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, or chronic unemployment.

Posted in Introduction to Sociology | 1 Comment »

7. June 2009 by student.

June, 2009 By Elizabeth Severo    

     What is the IQ test and what does it measure exactly?  The IQ test is a socially accepted examination that is designed to measure and score the intellectual capacity of a person.  There are many controversies surrounding this entire concept.  Linda, S. Siegel, a professor of special education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, Ontario states in her article printed in the Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 22, No. 8, 469-478 (1989), “ IQ scores measure factual knowledge, expressive language abilities, and short-term memory.”

Yale Psychologist Robert Sternberg, a leader in cognitive research on human development argues that “Psychologist know almost nothing about what it is these tests are measuring.  The tests have proved overall to have only low to moderate power to predict such things as future job performance, income or status, or overall happiness and adjustment.”      

In addition, society can not even agree on the definition of intelligence. 

 ·         Alfred Binet, the French Psychologist, who designed the original IQ test, defines intelligence as: “It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which, is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances. A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment” (Binet & Simon, 1916, 1973, pp.42-43). 

·         Psychologist Howard Gardner has suggested that individuals have multiple intelligences, each relatively independent of the others.  He considers intelligence to include up to seven spheres (Gardener, 1983, 1997; Krechevsky and Gardner, 1990: Gardner, Kornhaber, & Wake, 1996). 

·         The definition under intelligence in the Grolier New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia states, “Everyone uses the words “smart” or “stupid” believing that these hold similar meanings for all of us.  But what is considered intelligent varies from society to society.  Even within the same society, ideas about intelligence change over time.”        

If society can not even agree on a complete and universal idea of the definition of intelligence, why are we using these tests?   “The WAIS-R, the 1981 revision of the original Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, is designed for adults, age 16-74. The 11 subtests of the WAIS-R include information, digit span, vocabulary, arithmetic, comprehension, similarities, picture completion, picture arrangement, block design, object assembly, and digit symbol. An example of questions on the subtest of similarities might be: “Describe how the following pair of words is alike or the same–hamburger and pizza.” A correct response would be “Both are things to eat (Encyclopedia of Medicine).”  Does this question not ask about an individual’s education rather than intellect?  Would a person from an indigenous tribe of South America know what hamburgers and pizza are?  Vocabulary, block design and digit symbol are social symbols that people are not born knowing about, these symbols must be learned.  What does intelligence have to do with any of those things?      According to Mary Reider, Secretary of psychological services for the Lee County Board of Education, stated that the Lee County education system uses a multitude of “intelligence tests” to assess children.  These test scores are then used in the system to segregate children into groups by the label defined by the educational psychologists and test facilitators.  Trust in our educational system guides parents and guardians to authorize these authoritative figures the power to administer these tests and interpret the results.  If social control and personal identity are intertwined, aren’t parents and guardians allowing the educational institutions the power and status to label and stigmatize our children?  In the text book; Sociology in our times, by Diana Kendall, she states, “Labeling students based on IQ scores has been an issue for many decades.  Immigrants from southern n and eastern Europe-particularly from Italy, Poland, and Russia – who arrived in this country at the beginning of the twentieth century, had lower IQ scores on average that did northern European immigrants who had arrived earlier from nations such as Great Britain.  For many of the white ethnic students, IQ testing became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Teachers did not expect them to do as well as children from a northern European (WASP) family background and thus did not encourage them or give them an opportunity to overcome language barriers or other educational obstacles.  Although, many students persisted and achieved an education, the possibility that differences in IQ scores could be attributed to linguistic, cultural, and educational biases in the tests was largely ignored (Feagin and Feagin, 2003).”  If for some students, a label, such as “mentally challenged” can define the outcome of whom and what they progress into as adults, shouldn’t parents, guardians and educators be more conscientious of the tools that they are using to make these critical assumptions about our children?    

     IQ tests have been researched and analyzed by a vast number of psychologist, sociologist and educators.  There has been a multitude of findings that clearly support that these tests are full of flaws, but yet, our educational system still uses them today in various forms.  So, why do we continue to use a test that does not do what is said to do?  The lack of a better approach or is it due to the control of the power elite?   Could it be because educational testing has grown into a large business and become one of our countries corporate power houses?  According to one of the many educational testing services in the United States and world wide, Educational Testing Service (ETS), a non-profit organization, works with and, “administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually, in more than 180 countries, and at over 9,000 locations worldwide (ets.org).”  How much income do those numbers bring in on an annual basis and exactly, how many individuals does that employ?  I think C. Wright Mills would agree that in the case of IQ and the tests surrounding them, parents and children do not hold any of the power! 

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