What's your IQ?

Intelligence vs. Ignorance

“Ignorance has always been the weapon of terrorists; enlightenment the salvation of the free.”

                                        Bill Richardson

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

                                        Martin Luther King

          Did you know that adults in the United States of America score lower on IQ tests than those in twenty-two other developed nations?  Here’s a statistic that will scare you:  Average Intelligence-China:  123.  Mexico: 104.  America:  98.  In other words, the average IQ of Americans has now fallen below the mean of 100 on the Bell curve.  The average American does not understand what molecules are; fewer than one-third of us can identify DNA as the key to heredity, and only about ten-percent know what radiation is.  Most Americans do not know where Peru is located---nor Iowa!  If that’s not enough to keep you up nights, I don’t know what will.

          The fact that hundreds of people followed the lead of Harold Camping, a radio talk show host and Bay Area minister, in believing the rapture would happen on May 21^st, is testimony to our backwardness.  The fact that our media hyped it as they did is testimony to our mediocrity.  As Americans, we must wake up and realize that our education systems are not working.  The brightest students are not being allowed to flourish and average students are not being optimized.  In my opinion, we should focus all our considerable wealth and attention on helping to enrich the education of every child in this country. 

          I don’t mean to preach, but this downward spiral and the championing of stupidity is terrifying to me.  I’m not saying that everyone in this country is ignorant, but I am saying that we must look at this problem squarely and then act.  William Huzlitt, English writer and humanist, once said, “Prejudice is the child of ignorance.”  If that is so, the essence of enlightenment is realizing that we are all in this together.  When one child is allowed to dwell in ignorance, all of us suffer and our country suffers, too. 

                                        Keeping the faith,

                                        Jane