At 07:47 PM 12/13/98 -0500, christopher wrote:
>I've been given IQ tests by schooling systems every 6 years of my life.
When I was a kid, Australian schools were not big on IQ tests. I suspect my life might have been far different if we'd had them. As a working class kid sent at pocket-scraping expense to a low-grade middle class Jesuit school, I was so dissonant with my peers that I was finally assumed to be a mental defective and exiled to a slum technical school at 12. I didn't do any better among the thugs, oddly enough. At around 14 or 15, the state provided some kind of standardised IQ-cum-aptitude test for everyone. There was a shocked flurry. Instead of sending me dutifully to a factory, my parents (who by then had another 5 kids and no more money) had the dismal prospect of finding fees for a real school. I solved this sideways by going into a seminary for a couple of years, before escaping to university and a life of sin. But the legacy of my totally fucked schooling meant that I didn't get my PhD until I was in my forties, and it's a bit late in the day to start a career as a professional philosopher at that stage. (But actually it might not be, if the anti-agathics arrive in time.) So I sympathise with Mike's reference to traumatic stress.
Damien Broderick