Intelligence Policy: Its Impact on College Admissions and Other Social Policies

260 Pages·1995·6.43 MB·English

by  Angela Browne-Miller (auth.)

Intelligence Policy
Its Impact on College Admissions
and Other Social Policies
ENVIRONMENT, DEVELOPMENT, AND
PUBLIC POLICY
A series of volumes under the general editorship of
Lawrence Susskind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
PUBLIC POLICY AND SOCIAL SERVICES
Series Editor: Gary Marx, University of Colorado,
Boulder, Colorado
Recent Volumes in this Series
AMERICANS ABROAD: A Comparative Study of
Emigrants from the United States
Arnold Dashefsky, Jan DeAmicis, Bernard Lazerwitz, and Ephraim Tabory
THE DIFFUSION OF MEDICAL INNOVATIONS: An Applied
Network Analysis
Mary L. Fennell and Richard B. Warnecke
DIVIDED OPPORTUNITIES: Minorities, Poverty, and Social Policy
Edited by Gary D. Sandefur and Marta Tienda
HISPANICS IN THE LABOR FORCE: Issues and Policies
Edited by Edwin Melendez, Clara Rodriguez, and Janis Barry Figueroa
INNOV AT ION UP CLOSE: How School Improvement Works
A. Michael Huberman and Matthew B. Miles
INTELLIGENCE POLICY: Its Impact on College Admissions
and Other Social Policies
Angela Browne-Miller
OSHA AND THE POLITICS OF HEALTH REGULATION
David P. McCaffrey
RACIAL AND CULTURAL MINORITIES: An Analysis of Prejudice
and Discrimination (Fifth Edition)
George E. Simpson and 1. Milton Yinger
Other subseries:
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND PLANNING
Series Editor: Lawrence Susskind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
CITIES AND DEVELOPMENT
Series Editor: Lloyd Rodwin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Intelligence Policy
Its Impact on College Admissions
and Other Social Pol icies
ANGELA BROWNE-MILLER
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
On file
The Cattell excerpt on p. vii is reprinted from Cattell, R. B. (1987). Intelligence and society. In
lntelligence: lts Structure, Growth and Action, of Stelmach, G. E. and Vroon, P. A. (Eds.),
Advances in Psychology (VoI. 35). New York: NHC, p. 619. The Eiseley excerpt is reprinted
[rom Eiseley, L. (1957). The lmmense Joumey. New York: Random House, p. 55. Appendixes
C.I-C.7 and C.l2 are reprinted with permis sion of the University of California, Office of the
President, Oakland, CA. llltroducillg the Ulliversity is revised and published annually.
ISBN 978-14613-5758-2 ISBN 978-14615-1865-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-14615-1865-5
© 1995 by Springer Science+Business Media New York
Origina11y published by Plenum Press, New York in 1992
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1992
10987654321
AII rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise,
without written permission from the Publisher
To my father, Lee Winston Browne, and
to my husband, Richard Louis Miller,
sages on the edge
If a trifling meteorite fifty miles in diameter hit the Pacific, it could cause such
survival problems that, without a sufficiency of men of genius, we should all
perish. Crawling on a planet's precariously stabilized skin, under which exist
incredible pressures and temperatures, and gazing at the vast explosions in an as
yet superficially understood outer universe, how can we doubt that understanding
through intelligence is our only hope?
RAYMOND B. CATTELL
in Intelligence: Its Structure, Growth and Action
[E. D. Cope, the nineteenth-century paleontologist,] first enunciated what he called
the "law of the unspecialized," the contention that it was not from the most highly
organized and dominant forms of a given geological era that the master type of a
succeeding period evolved, but that instead the dominant forms tended to arise
from more lowly and generalized animals which were capable of making new
adaptations, and which were not narrowly restricted to a given environment ...
[But] who is to say without foreknowledge ofthe future which animal is specialized
and which is not?
LOREN EISELEY
in The Immense Journey
Foreword
When Angela Browne-Miller first came to my springtime-long field class in
natural history, dressed in camouflage fatigues, the place began to buzz. Angela
was, even then, back in 1975, as a senior undergraduate at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, a predator of ideas for whom no old shibboleth was sacred.
I can still hear her asking, "What do you mean by that? You've justtold me .... "
No old icon was safe, and no conventional wisdom was allowed to gloss over a
shaky structure of faulty assumptions.
And she's still that way. In this marvelous book she's put all these rapier
thrusts of hers in little boxes enclosed by black lines. You read along, following
one of her clear arguments, and there will be a box, and in it will be a sentence that
requires you to stop and back up. You must-she requires it of you-reconsider
the very framework on which your emerging ideas are based. I've never met a
book like it. But that's Angela for you.
What does she challenge in this book of hers? Well, if I were drawing the
boxes, I'd say that in the first one would be a flat statement like this:
Our society constantly applies assessments of intelligence as decisions
are made about admission, advancement, etc.
Angela would probably not allow me the "etc." since she would want to know
what I meant, and what I meant was that I gave up thinking about categories but
that there are, I'm pretty sure, a lot of them. I can hear her focusing on the matter
now, not letting me off the hook.
At any rate, in this book Angela probes and prods about this vital and
combustible issue, clarifying the places where we have hidden things from
ourselves. We humans are deathly afraid of being ranked or classed-and with
good cause. The most luminous example of what can happen is the Holocaust,
where people of all sorts-frail gentle old ladies, intellectuals, little children,
and the rest-were labeled and killed for bearing the label. Who knows what that
meant? Who applied the label? What shaped their decisions? In today's world,
ix
x FOREWORD
white journalists entering a black "homeland" in South Africa feel they are
protected because of their empathy with the plight of the blacks, but then they
have this shield stripped away when they see the visceral welling outrage of blacks
they've never met. The confrontation sends them cowering for cover. In the wake
of classification nothing remains but black and white. And that's what we fear, that
is, that such classifications will polarize us and that labels will be misused.
And yet, beneath this fear we do rank each other. Constantly. Ponder the
following unexceptional statement: "The University of California accepts the
upper 12Yz% of California's students. "
We must, in fact, perform such classification if our populace is to be trained
and selected for the vastly diverse mental needs of our society. We must classify
if we are to direct this or that young person into the places where he or she can
succeed. But unless we know what we mean by intelligence, or what performance
in a test signifies, we are surely engaged in a crudely defined process that will
fail to do justice to many young people, and to our society more broadly. For many
of them the anger may never leave.
Beneath this substrate of need are even more basic questions, and Angela
teases them all out into the open. She spends many pages exploring questions like
the following: If human minds are of multiple dimensions, can we be measured
and ordered according to a simple scale? How can we approach the diversity of
mind? If you rank minds according to a single scale and find that, for example, the
races of the human species fall out in a regular order with so-and-so at the top and
so-and-so at the bottom, does this really mean anything we can use to rank people
by? Haven't we crammed a multivariate species into the peg holes that define a
single curve? Don't those shavings that piled up on the floor when the pegs didn't
fit represent the true richness of society, the stuff that matters most? What have we
lost? How can we do better?
Angela explores another domain: How much is predetermined by the inher
ited mind, and how much can be shaped to fit the creations of our culture? Is the
job of a grade school or university to mold minds, to shape and change intel
ligence? Or is it to take the diverse minds that stream through the admission
process and allocate them, or let them allocate themselves, to the places in the
smorgasbord of the educational establishment where they find they best fit and are
most likely to succeed?
What Angela shows is that, after decades of trying, even the basic questions
about ranking humans according to intelligence remain a morass of fuzzy thinking
and that most ranking is done by a single generalized criterion that lumps us all
together. The term learning is apt to be used coterminously with intelligence, and
what intelligence might be remains as fuzzy as ever. Some neurobiologists insist
we are of multiple minds, and yet the measures we use to gauge ourselves take little
heed of this emerging fact.
All during my reading of this book I thought about my own mind and
FOREWORD xi
wondered what would be measured if I sat down to take a Spearman test or one of
the other methods of measuring what I am like. There is no way the one
dimensional examinations would reflect me very well. At best they would come
out with some sort of average assessment that took the best of my mind and
mushed it up with the worst. The average test would steer me only in the most
general way. The best thing somebody who assessed me might do would be to say,
"Looks like there's something there. Turn him loose in academia and see what
happens. " The test would not tell the obvious places where I excel or those where I
am woefully lacking. Now that I have retired and have a long career behind me,
let me use my case to explain what I mean.
I am a naturalist -biologist (which means I like to work in nature), weB known
in a fairly narrow circle for my studies of thermal biology of desert animals and for
similar work with fish and best known for discovering many aspects of the biology
of dolphins, especially their echolocation and social behavior. My work, if you
could call it work, has taken me all over the world, and I went as a scientist, which
only superficially covered the fact that I am also an artist, captivated to the very
deepest recesses of my being by the beauty and perfection I find in nature; in plants
and animals; and in the physical world of wind and water, sun and rock. Most
important of all, I see directly what is in front of me in nature, not stereotypes
that I have filed in my mind. I can draw the animals and plants I see with elegant
fidelity, if not artistic panache. My parents, one an artist and the other an
outdoorsman-engineer, truly defined the limits and possibilities of my mind and
what I have been able to do with it.
My own special stock-in-trade as a scientist has been a capacity to see in
three dimensions and to perceive and think with patterns and with patterns within
patterns-the gestalts of life, the surrounds within which all of us live, the
ecologies, the sociobiologies, the cultures. This has been so strong in me that when
faced with mathematics as a young student, I immediately applied my capacity for
seeing relationships to it. In geometry everything was relationships, and they were
visual. Piece of cake. Then came algebra. Forget it. I could see the quadratic
equations okay, but when asked to deal with where it led, I was hopelessly mired.
Algebra, I later learned from my mathematician daughter, just as I was about to
retire, isn't like that. It's a chain of smaBlogical steps, using tested rules, leading
who knows where. How could I envision a thing like that? I couldn't, and most of
mathematics for me became a sea of frustration as I tried over and over to apply the
strength of my mind to it and failed. Algebra, and much else, had no obvious
surround. So my part of science became the imaginative leap, and more and more I
came to work with others who could do the one-step-at-a-time things, which
included not only math but every instrument that imposed itself between me and
nature as well.
Now, what would a Spearman test or any test of mental ability do with me?
Certainly, the quality of my mind is difficult to measure. Certainly, measures of
xii FOREWORD
mathematical and verbal abilities are not good indications of how my mind per
forms best. Perception of gestalts isn't remembering or using words or numbers. In
my view, it is preverbal. But analogies tests and spatial questions are also
inadequate measures. Perhaps the quality of my memory is a better, but still
incomplete, measure. There was a time when my long-term memory was stuffed
with an amazing clutter. It's thinning out a little now. And this is good, I think.
My naturalist's ability to see in nature has always depended upon avoiding
those stereotyped representations for trees, rocks, people, and animals that we file
in our minds as a kind of shorthand and upon actually looking directly at these
natural things. That capacity is apparently involved in crossovers between the
various hemispheres and subsections of my brain. Such crossover has been very
important to my intellectual activity, even central. What really tests that?
So, in my view, if a psychometrician wanted to test me successfully, most of
the important things to know about me would be the interactive workings of the
various nonverbal constructs of my mind. Only after gauging those things would
one find any value in knowing about the trove of words I carry around or the large
but idiosyncratic collection of ideas, concepts, and facts that I have never stopped
gathering or constructing.
So I perk up when Angela lays out before the reader the simplicities of how
we try to gauge what we warily call intelligence. She finds much basic theoretical
confusion between the basic organizations of mind that predict performance and
the results of working minds. She elegantly shows the dance that masks the
ubiquity of intelligence assessment in our society, one that may well be based on
false premises and mistakes in the basic constructs we use to explain intellectual
performance.
Beyond these things, as I read this book, I wondered, "Is the university so
much a creation of the dominant culture as to be inaccessible to others?" What
does that statement, analyzed and pared into its pieces, mean? What does it have
to do with mind, with this thing we call "intelligence"? We're back to that again.
Following Angela through this intellectual thicket is what the book is about.
There's much more in it than I could tell here. If anyone is to lead us out of the
mire of false premises and hidden agendas about how we gauge each other, it's
likely to be Angela Browne-Miller.
KENNETH S. NORRIS
Professor Emeritus of Natural History
University of California at Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz. California