Articles > The New IQ

We are all individually different.
So what’s the big deal? Really.

Physically we range from a few protons long before birth to over 7 feet tall in adulthood. The range at various ages is wide. Some of us grow to be only a few feet tall and others tower over us at 7, 8 and even 9 feet.

Our skin colors range across a spectrum of translucent through to white to gray to red, to brown to purple to black.

Socially we range from very shy and withdrawn to outwardly confident and boastful. Some of us are able to care for ourselves, our friends our family, our communities, our world and our universe. Some cannot care for themselves but care deeply for others and some can care for many but care only for themselves.

Academically we range from being confused about the simplest things to wise about the universal truths of the world, from pedantically focused to globally focused, from numerically bewildered to mathematically enlightened.

Artistically we range from befuddled to magnificent.

Our languages range from speaking simply with our eyes, our emotional signals through to complex spoken and written words in 1000’s of unique configurations and codes.
Thus, if one recognizes the truth... people are diverse and different and this is how it has always been.

The Old Way of Looking:
The dilemmas of individual differences:

Labeling: more harm than good:
Among the ranges of normal, human, individual differences we have, throughout recorded history, chosen a few of these differences to label as “disabilities”. We have promoted, over time, some folks to be the labelers and others to be the labeled. Our current society has such a refined industry of labelers that it is possible that some people spend their whole careers creating and refining labels (and of course applying them to people) and do nothing else. In some societies it has been the wise women & men who are promoted to labeling. We call them “experts” .. but in the school yard around the globe we know this labeling as bullying and name calling. In childhood we are taught that it not nice to call names and view this as harassment. In adulthood however, with the privilege of having learned to do it properly from those who did it in last generation, it is viewed as “professional”. Be it professional or bully, name calling or labeling, sets in train a plethora of consequences for the labeled child as to be most likely, live defining.

Once labeled in the playground or clinic, the rest of the kids look at you differently. They stop seeing YOU and begin to see your difference. Your difference is somehow more important than everyone else's individual difference because yours has a label and that label is now part of YOUR name. If that weren’t bad enough, your parents, their parents, your grandparents ..everyone that matters... also sees the difference as being more of who you are than any of the 1000 other parts of who you are. And if that weren’t bad enough, given time, YOU will begin seeing that this difference IS who you are.

The Historical Habit of Segregation:
Thousands of years ago, people began leaving traces of the way they felt about some individual differences. Throughout the centuries we hear the stories, read the laws and see the footprints of practice that tell us that most earlier civilizations had some pretty gnarly views about some people of their time. Sure, the former civilizations passed down lots of cool ideas like democracy, science and math.

But not everything they did was so cool. Most early civilizations went to war when they didn’t like the way the other people thought or looked.
Some early civilizations got the idea that labeling victims of war as slaves meant they could be forced to work for free. They passed that tradition down.

A nasty habit begins and is then passed on.

Thousands of years later, we still suffer from that nasty habit; however globally we began kicking that habit in the last 100 years. Proudly we are passing on a new habit of including children whose ancestors were treated as slaves as equal human beings but we are still struggling with the fall-out from this old, nasty habit. Most conquered people, many of these are indigenous people, still suffer being thought of as the early Greeks and Romans taught us to do, oh so long ago.

Many early civilizations labeled women as inferior, didn’t allow them to vote, traded them as livestock. They passed that tradition down and we still suffer from that nasty habit .. We began kicking that habit in the last 100 years. Proudly we are passing on a new habit of including girls as equal human beings but we are still struggling with the fall-out from this old, nasty habit.

Early civilizations got the idea that labeling other individual differences of people meant they could be forced into segregation. They passed that tradition down for women, conquered people and others ..including people whose body or mind was thought to be “broken” in some way.

We still suffer from all of these habits, some more than others.

Unlike some of the other habits mentioned, we have not fully come to see it as a bad habit to treat people with labels for their disabilities in this way. Maybe, like war, we have yet to mature to a point where we can admit to centuries of killing & segregation of people against their will as bad habits that we should kick.

A New Way of Seeing the Old Ways:
A Paradigm Shift Is Possibly On the Horizon:

Educational “service” provisions to Australian children and youth with labels and their families, in particular those whose label has been related to their intellect, falsely or otherwise (ADD, ADHD, autism, blind, cerebral palsy, deaf, Down’s syndrome, epilepsy, intellectual disability, learning disabled etc) have been undergoing a substantive re-think of recent. At such points, paradigm shifting is possible. For what appears to observers as no real new definitive reason, the collective consciousness begins to shift. What advocates of change had worked decades to raise without much of a hearing, all of a sudden is accepted, although not always understood.

Histories are written for this purpose. They can instruct the casual or new observer of why all of a sudden things seem to be changing overnight. History also provides a great caution against repeating the same old mistakes – yet again. Knowing the progression of history can assist in seeing at least a small way into the possible futures. Here are some histories you might wish to explore further: The early Greeks invented the term idiot. They also invented the Hippocratic oath.

The early Spartans legislated & killed children with the label.

The early French built large institutions, separated men & women and kept labeled people in chains.

Early English: Built government run poor houses and contracted labeled people out to work to pay for their care.

Early Lutherans: (Luther) Developed the thought that labeled people were evil-“Changelings” Early English Cleric: (Malthus) developed the notion of killing those who were non-productive. Early Americans: Built on the works of the English & French, creating larger institutions, farm colonies for labeled people to work for their care, separated men from women, developed the notion of sterilization to kill a future generation, developed the evil notion of Luther into a science – moral imbecility – later to be known as moron. Early Germans: Built on the works of the English, French & Americans creating the same institutions, the same work colonies, and the same sterilization of women to kill a future generation and then expanded this notion of euthanasia to experimentation, working to death and extermination of lots of labeled people.

Early Australians: Built on the works of the English, French & Americans creating the same institutions, the same work colonies, the same sterilization of women.

Later Greeks, French, Germans, English, Americans and Australians inherited these legacies and in turned, passed them on.

Our generation, in turn, continued the labeling, built it into a great “science” where some people spend their whole careers, labeling and segregating. Our generation sophisticated the killings by developing a medical science of discovery, label and destroy before birth.

We expanded the experimentations to stem cell & other research AND we developed a new ethics to go along with it. Out with the Hippocratic oath – in with Singer’s new “bio-ethic” oath to seek and destroy.
Like every generation before ours, we have had to sit at the learning table of history and decide. Will be carry on the habits of our ancestors? Can we improve on them or will we discard them and try another way.

The paradigm shift we are currently in, is giving some hope for the families that we will shed our old habit of segregation and start afresh with inclusion. Such is the size of the shift we are considering when we look at this thing called inclusion that one cannot say how much shift will occur or how many generations a complete shift might take.

When we hear the excited or worried words of those who are struggling with this shift, we are reminded of the ancient story of the blind men and the elephant. Are we standing so close to something so large that we cannot see it in its entirety? We believe so.

Some of us only see the part that is for kids formerly labeled by what they couldn’t do. We think that inclusion, like the elephant’s toenail, is just another way of treating kids with labels.
Some of us only see the part that is our job.

If we are a teacher, we might think that inclusion, like the elephant’s body, is a huge new responsibility. Inclusion they say on close perception is about having more kids, with more diversity in our classroom .. with more adults telling us what to do, watching us, giving us advice and pulling us in a thousand confusing directions with no pre-training and little in-service. For others among us, inclusion is like the fad of a circus, enjoyed for a few moments but gone the next day, leaving others to clean up the mess.
If we are a teacher aide, we might think inclusion, like the elephant’s handler, is about having one child who is our responsibility to protect from others and whom you protect others-including the teacher - from.
If we are an administrator, we might think inclusion, like the elephant’s owner, is about new costs and new savings. Inclusion, they say on close perception, is about balancing costs, hiring good handlers and keeping the crowds happy.
If we are an advocate, we might think inclusion, like the conservationist, is about freeing the elephant from captivity, stopping the exploitation, righting one wrong in a world of wrong doing. Getting people out of enforced segregation.

If we are a modernistic bio-ethics, we might think inclusion, like the elephant’s presence on a farmer’s land, is a burden. Inclusion, they say on close perception, is a bad philosophy for it requires sacrifice and change from our self-centered happiness formula of quality of life. Sacrifice and sharing make people unhappy therefore inclusion is a bad idea.
If we step back, open our eyes wide and look deep into history and broadly across the horizons of the globe, we begin to see that inclusion is all of these things and none of these things. Inclusion is about new way of seeing the world. It is a way of looking at ALL children as critically important, essential human beings. If we leave any of them out even just one– if we fail to develop any one of them – we take away from what humanity could become.

A New Way of Seeing:
Human Becomings:

Inclusion is about the human condition of becoming.

Becoming human is the challenge of each generation. Any historical sort of examination will conclude that we have yet to become fully humane in the inclusion of ALL people. Inclusion asks us to answer 2 important moral questions:

Will we pass onto our children a new habit of what it means to becoming humane? Or
Will we pass on the nasty habits of the past?

Inclusion is simple because it is simply ensuring everyone belongs.

Inclusion is complex because:

It is about humanity, something few of us ever get much more than a puzzled understanding of.

We have a long history of not doing it outside of families.
We have NEVER done it everywhere at the same time.
We have rarely done it anywhere for very long except in families.
We know how NOT to do it very, very well.
We don’t know how to do it very well. We are afraid to do it.
If we decide to do it, WE have change the course of history.

Shifting to inclusion can be painful:

If we imagine the paradigm shift as 2 crotch high containers separated by barbed wire and we try to keep a foot in each container!
A Big Hint:
(Pain should be a signal to take one’s foot out of the segregation container.)
Inclusion is liberating and simple. We need only 2 things to make it happen:

The will to include; and
The skill to include

A New Way of Seeing IQ:

Broken Communities: Why they have low IQ’s :
The IQ of community is its ability to include all of its members. We have coined this as the inclusion quotient to be a replacement in the inclusive society for the old IQ of the segregative society that needed a tool to determine who would get segregated.

The problem has never been what is wrong with this child or person such that s/he must be placed out of community. The problem has long been - what is wrong with this society, this community, this school - that gets in the way of their including all of their children?

The new IQ examines the social and mental health of school community, the larger community and even society itself.

When we originally wrote a report card on Inclusion in Australia, we noted that some places had a very low IQ and overall, as a nation we had a below par IQ.

Click here to view the report card

This was not because of the lack of brilliance of the people but because of our low capacities to include. Much of this assessment noted that the will to include was not there. In fact we noted that not only wasn’t their will to include in some places, there was active work being done to kill inclusion.
We have come to see this as a measure of the brokenness of communities .. communities with low IQ have low capacity for inclusion.

The good news about this IQ test is that you can actually improve and dramatically. Further good news is that to score rapid growth, unheard of with the old IQ, it costs next to nothing. To change one’s will is inexpensive. The new IQ is a developmental instrument designed with positive beliefs about people & communities and their (as yet) mostly untapped potentials. Unlike the old IQ, the inclusion quotient is predictive and developmental. We can, for instance, predict that over the period of few short years we will see the IQ of Western Australia. and Queensland move from D’s to B’s because they have recently changed their will about inclusive schooling.

4 classes of Communities with Low IQ’s:

1. Communities with Low Physical Inclusion Quotients

The IQ of some communities (including school communities) is low because they are physically broken. The landscape is designed for only those able enough to navigate the artificial barriers that have been constructed without thinking about all of its people. Such communities - nice as they are for some - have IQ’s in the dull and selfish range and are in need of much work on the curriculum of sharing. Community landscape planners should spend much time learning about the essence of community a sort of new, revamped “life skills” training, so that they learn that not everyone that wants to get around and enjoy the richness of our landscapes-city and country- has a car, can drive, can navigate high steps and the other obstacles we put in the way of many people with and without labels so that their communities might break down these barriers and graduate to higher levels of IQ.

2. Socially Retarded Communities:

The IQ of other communities (including school communities), whilst scoring well on the physical access sub-scale of the IQ, fail miserably when it comes to the more advanced IQ items of social understanding and adaptation. These communities suffer from both a lack of experience and habit of learning how to welcome others into their social life.

It is understandable that such communities may have been deprived of early experiences in adaptation and thus these communities may be embarrassed about their clumsiness in adapting to the wide range of individual difference. Such communities, possibly retarded from deprivation, may seek solace with their “own kind”. Whilst this provides some initial comfort, it is never-the-less highly maladaptive and should be treated with the earliest possible intervention. Unless taught from an early age, it appears that few recover, even though the potential is always there to do so. Encouraging research demonstrates that the IQ of a socially retarded community can fortunately be increased to a point of near full recovery .. if guided carefully through experiences missed in early childhood. Our initial findings are that people who they’ve excluded are particularly good guides and mentors in this re-birthing process. This is embarrassing for them however and we struggle to keep their esteem from reverting into the ego and ethnocentric phobias, so much caution is advised. It is yet to be seen if such communities can fully recover from this deprivation but never-the-less we should assist them to reach their fullest potential.

3. Developmentally Delayed Communities:

Those communities (including school communities) in the special classes of low IQ that show most promise are those that have learned to physically and socially include all of its people but are slow to learn how to adjust to involve all in the schooling and in the working of its community. These slow learners are trying hard and should be acknowledged with much praise to enhance their true abilities. It is possible, that if we task-analyse the steps of adjusting school curriculum, model this repeatedly and praise efforts that they will learn these adjustments. Some radical researchers even believe that such communities are capable of learning very high order lateral thinking skills and once achieved are said to have fully recovered from low IQ and now display a measure giftedness in capacity that is almost unmeasurable.

Whilst such reports are provocative, they never-the-less show us the cutting edge of possibility. Albeit much better controlled studies should be done over time before claims of full recovery should be considered possible.

As with school life some researchers have also applied the task analysis, praise and even lateral thinking models to the work of a community.

Because there is a generic problem with work, the IQ of most communities is much lower than in most other areas of study. Although the techniques of task analysis have already been applied, the techniques of lateral thinking appear much more difficult to teach to communities with this condition. We suspect that the IQ suffers from a combination of social retardation as well as the presenting developmental delay in one key aspect: sharing one’s wealth. Again, this points to the seriously and sometimes highly specific impairing effects of early deprivation that may go back several generations.

4. Moral Imbecility

We have a class here that number for number is the most dangerous kind of community. Far lower on IQ than all others because of its conscious resistance to inclusion. Whilst other categories of low IQ are primarily unconscious and therein, at least partially recoverable with generous applications of will & skill, moral imbecility is particularly resistant to a change of will.

This special class of low IQ is not effected by modeling, lateral thinking, nor guidance by even the most skilled of the rejected members for a community. Such a community has developed a belief system that inclusion is morally bad and segregation - even by killing at birth is morally good.

It has been said that just one bad bio-ethicist may corrupt a whole village.

Preachers of this moral imbecility such as Peter Singer are given as evidence; however we are more conservative and hopeful that even whole communities suffering from moral imbecility could be treated, over time with a sort of moral treatment that might free them from their troubled souls. Nevertheless, we should take special measures in decisions to treat such persons and communities when much richer potential lies within the other 3 categories of low IQ.

Let us leave you with a few thoughts on the New IQ. Whilst somewhat tongue in cheek, we are serious that IQ should measure the capacities of communities and not the capacities of children. The verbal IQ of communities, those at least willing to “talk the talk” is the potential for building capacity. We should however be more concerned about performance IQ, walking the talk. We don’t have time to explicate the new report card here .. but “watch this space”.

Thanks for reading... Thanks for caring.
Darrell Wills BA/MEd
Educational Consultant