From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Dec 14 1998 - 04:49:21 MST
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
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