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A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother's Reckoning with the IQ Test w/ Dr. Pepper Stetler
4 Plays6 months ago
Today we are joined by Dr. Pepper Stetler. Pepper’s recently released book, A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning with the IQ Test documents her journey alongside her daughter, Louisa, who was diagnosed with Down syndrome. It dives into the history and ongoing problematic issues with measuring intelligence, specifically how school and society uphold and reinforce misused and misappropriated labels. Pepper’s work on disability advocacy has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Washington Post, and she’s also an Art History professor at Miami University.
Book: A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother's Reckoning with the IQ Test
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Transcript
Introduction to Human Restoration Project
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of our podcast.
00:00:15
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
00:00:20
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kyle Prince, Jen Olson, and Stacey Cadence Hilgenberg.
00:00:29
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:30
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on social media and YouTube.
00:00:37
Speaker
We're so proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years.
00:00:42
Speaker
So if you haven't yet, consider rating our podcast in your app to help us reach more of
00:00:51
Speaker
Dr. Pepper Stetler.
00:00:52
Speaker
Pepper's recently released book, A Measure of Intelligence, One Mother's Reckoning with the IQ Test, documents her journey alongside her daughter, Lisa, who is diagnosed with Down
Introduction to 'A Measure of Intelligence'
00:01:02
Speaker
syndrome.
00:01:02
Speaker
It dives into the history and ongoing problematic issues with measuring intelligence, specifically how school and society uphold and reinforce misused and misappropriated labels.
00:01:13
Speaker
Pepper's work on disability advocacy has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.
00:01:19
Speaker
And she's also an art history professor at Miami University.
00:01:22
Speaker
So thank you for joining us today, Pepper.
Experiences with IQ Tests and IEP
00:01:24
Speaker
Hi, Chris.
00:01:25
Speaker
I'm so glad to be here.
00:01:27
Speaker
Thanks so much for inviting me on.
00:01:29
Speaker
Yeah, of course.
00:01:30
Speaker
So I mean, starting off, I was really struck by you and your daughter's story and their journey through early life and now starting school.
00:01:37
Speaker
And I know that this is kind of sort of the point of the entire book.
00:01:41
Speaker
I wonder if you could offer a brief introduction about you and your daughter's story.
00:01:46
Speaker
Yes, of course.
00:01:47
Speaker
So I start the book off with this experience that I think a lot of parents have when their child is about to start kindergarten and they need to be on an IEP or an individualized education program.
00:02:07
Speaker
And it's this
00:02:09
Speaker
document that really kind of outlines certain goals for a child and also what kind of supports a kid who might have a particular diagnosis might need to keep up in a mainstream classroom.
00:02:28
Speaker
So it's a document that's really supposed to kind of give
00:02:32
Speaker
kids with disabilities and different learning challenges access to a mainstream classroom.
00:02:40
Speaker
And so my daughter Louisa has has Down syndrome and we kind of knew this was coming up.
00:02:47
Speaker
And I went to to the first IEP meeting before kindergarten and I was presented with a lot of information.
Research and Development of the Book
00:02:56
Speaker
And one of one of those things was
00:03:00
Speaker
results of her IQ test.
00:03:03
Speaker
And I'm sure the school had asked for permission for this, and I had signed some sort of form that I was like, eventually just forgot that I had signed to give permission to these.
00:03:15
Speaker
But then we're discussing the results with the school psychologist who
00:03:21
Speaker
And there was just a lot about it that I was really confused about.
00:03:26
Speaker
I was confused by the redundancy of it.
00:03:30
Speaker
In Louise's particular case, I think the challenges and the strengths for a kid with Down syndrome are pretty well known.
00:03:40
Speaker
And Louise is pretty typical in that way for a kid with Down syndrome.
00:03:45
Speaker
So it wasn't as if the IQ test was telling us
00:03:48
Speaker
any new or particularly helpful information in that way.
Problems with IQ Tests and Historical Context
00:03:53
Speaker
And it all just seemed very kind of bureaucratic, right?
00:03:56
Speaker
Like something that had to happen just to get this IEP rolling.
00:04:03
Speaker
Except, you know, I knew about a little bit at that time about the kind of history of IQ tests.
00:04:08
Speaker
And there was a part of me that was just kind of like, oh, we still do this.
00:04:13
Speaker
OK, I did it.
00:04:14
Speaker
I didn't know we still do this.
00:04:16
Speaker
And then, you know, there was another weird part of me that I slowly started to kind of realize and come to terms with is that like one of the things the school psychologist said to me was like, well, Louisa's IQ is
00:04:31
Speaker
is low, but it's actually pretty high for a kid with Down syndrome.
00:04:37
Speaker
And there was a kind of part of me that was like, yes, I had done something.
00:04:43
Speaker
Like that was a good thing.
00:04:45
Speaker
And it somehow, I think I realized over time that I felt as if that reflected on me as a parent, right?
00:04:54
Speaker
So I was already like feeling this tension about how
00:04:59
Speaker
I clearly valued this test in some way from my response, but also knew that it was problematic at the same time.
00:05:08
Speaker
And so from there, like I'm an art history professor and this book has nothing to do with art history, but I know how to research and I started researching.
00:05:21
Speaker
I started reading psychology journals and articles about intelligence and
00:05:26
Speaker
an IQ test.
00:05:28
Speaker
I started looking into the history of the IQ test.
00:05:31
Speaker
And then I kind of realized that I had a lot here that I wanted to kind of turn into a book.
00:05:39
Speaker
Yeah, what's fascinating to me, and I would love to hone in on this idea of
00:05:45
Speaker
Being formally diagnosed with Down syndrome, but then having that extra bureaucratic layer and the way the label and the score impacts your daughter's journey.
IQ Scores and Disability Services
00:05:57
Speaker
There's a quote in the book where you say, it's clear to me that the IQ test was set up knowing exactly how someone with Down syndrome would perform.
00:06:04
Speaker
It was designed to put her behind the curve.
00:06:08
Speaker
But there seems to be an irony in there because she performs so well, like air quotes there so well on intelligence tests that it seems like it actually disqualifies her for the level of services that she would require despite a formal medical diagnosis.
00:06:24
Speaker
Right.
00:06:24
Speaker
I mean, it's this this bind in between like reality and and bureaucratic need.
00:06:32
Speaker
Her her IQ when it was measured was too to a little too high to officially qualify her for a diagnosis of intellectual disability, like the official
00:06:46
Speaker
Diagnostic and statistical manual of psychiatry diagnosis of an intellectual disability, except like, you know, humans can step in and say, like, well, wait a second here.
00:06:59
Speaker
This is this is a child with with Down syndrome.
00:07:03
Speaker
And that's a kind of unique.
00:07:05
Speaker
position to be in, in the sense that Louisa's challenges are due to like to chromosomes, right?
00:07:13
Speaker
And we can look and like objectively find a diagnosis.
00:07:17
Speaker
And there are other things like autism and other disabilities that aren't so
00:07:26
Speaker
aren't able to be kind of identified in such a objective way, which I think changes the value of, of the IQ test in a lot of, a lot of ways.
00:07:37
Speaker
So like she had a official diagnosis of, I think a, a speech disorder for, for a while.
00:07:44
Speaker
Cause that's one that she could be kind of classified as without this particular, without her IQ being, um,
00:07:54
Speaker
And that's probably going to change, I guess, somewhere around the road.
00:07:59
Speaker
But it's this weird bind where we depend on her IEP and therefore the IQ test to give her access to a classroom, right?
00:08:11
Speaker
To give her what she needs, the certain accommodations and things that she needs to learn in a classroom with her peers, right?
00:08:21
Speaker
She will probably need the diagnosis of intellectual disability later in her life to get Medicaid or Social Security.
00:08:31
Speaker
So it's necessary, but at the same time, it also segregates her in a lot of ways.
00:08:39
Speaker
It identifies her as different and even...
00:08:43
Speaker
Even the very label and association with a number is something that most of us don't have to have in our lives.
00:08:52
Speaker
I don't know my IQ.
00:08:55
Speaker
That's not a way in which people identify me quantitatively in my life, but that's part of her record now in ways that seems...
00:09:06
Speaker
seems unfair.
00:09:07
Speaker
So that's what I wanted to really address in the book.
00:09:10
Speaker
And then I really started to realize after I got into researching the way in which IQ tests really shapes how our entire world thinks about intelligence, right?
00:09:23
Speaker
So whether or not I allow my daughter to continue to have her IQ test
00:09:30
Speaker
tested, that decision won't directly impact all of the other ways in which our society is set up to discriminate and limit the opportunities of people with intellectual disabilities.
Legacy and Misuse of IQ Tests
00:09:46
Speaker
Right.
00:09:46
Speaker
I was super struck by how odd the test
00:09:55
Speaker
test is and I was familiar with a lot of its history specifically regarding like eugenics and really problematic racist sexist stuff yeah but I wasn't as familiar with literally what was on the IQ test and there's a question in the book I'm doing this from memory but it's something like how are horses and cows related and it's an ABCD and it's like they're on a farm you can ride them they're brown but there were
00:10:19
Speaker
Multiple plausible answers.
00:10:21
Speaker
And I was looking through the book and I was like, well, man, first off, I wonder what the right answer is because I feel like I don't know.
00:10:28
Speaker
But also it just seems like such an odd system to base whatever it means to define intelligence on.
00:10:37
Speaker
And there's just so much cognitive dissonance there around the label and the power of the IQ test, but also how absurd it seems like the IQ test is.
00:10:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:49
Speaker
You said something before about how like my my daughter is not going to do well on an IQ test.
00:10:55
Speaker
Right.
00:10:55
Speaker
And it's it's it's set up so that she doesn't do well on on an IQ test.
00:11:02
Speaker
And I think that's part of it is that.
00:11:05
Speaker
it defines one particular kind of intelligence.
00:11:09
Speaker
And it's very accurate in measuring that kind of intelligence, right?
00:11:14
Speaker
But I guess my overall argument is that we could change the way that we think about intelligence.
00:11:22
Speaker
We could devalue the things that are on IQ tests.
00:11:27
Speaker
And that might provide more access and opportunity to
00:11:30
Speaker
to everybody.
00:11:31
Speaker
So there's, there's a chapter in the book in which I actually went and like had an IQ test because I thought that was the best way of like getting into what, what is on this, this test.
00:11:44
Speaker
And it, it really drove home to me how the IQ test defines intelligence with things like efficiency, productivity, short term memory, pattern recognition,
00:12:00
Speaker
decision making based on experiences in the past, these sorts of skills that are not coincidentally the things that make good modern workers, right?
00:12:11
Speaker
Like these are the things that are successful, make someone successful in the modern world and modern professions.
00:12:18
Speaker
Right.
00:12:19
Speaker
It doesn't have anything to do with like older agrarian society professions like farming or blacksmithing or things like that, which, you know, I point out just to suggest the historical definition and how the way that we think of intelligence isn't
00:12:39
Speaker
something that is inherent and measurable, say like a heartbeat or a breath.
00:12:44
Speaker
It is a decided upon set of characteristics in our world.
00:12:51
Speaker
Right.
00:12:51
Speaker
And it justifies the use of power against folks.
00:12:56
Speaker
You bring up an example where you were, I think you were touring a school or you were inside of a school and there was a kid who was being dragged down the hallway.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:05
Speaker
You had some form of intellectual disability.
00:13:08
Speaker
And you mentioned about how the institutionalized power as a result of them being diagnosed in this way lends itself to basically rationalize their dehumanization.
00:13:20
Speaker
Like we are capable of harming someone because they are of a certain type or certain label, etc.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:13:30
Speaker
It was a really horrifying experience.
00:13:34
Speaker
And equally horrifying, I think, was the fact that when I saw it, I didn't do anything about it.
00:13:40
Speaker
Like just how you said there's a kind of naturalization of nature.
00:13:46
Speaker
the acceptability of harm to people that are different.
00:13:52
Speaker
That is completely unacceptable to me, but at the moment, I just didn't understand it yet, I guess.
00:14:01
Speaker
But there's ways in which that allows us to associate difference
00:14:08
Speaker
and say not complying with a school classroom environment well with being being a bad kid, right?
00:14:16
Speaker
Like a behavioral behavioral difference.
00:14:19
Speaker
And I think the the challenges of school paying attention, working quickly, all of those things,
00:14:29
Speaker
often manifest themselves in kids as deviation from good behavior, right?
00:14:36
Speaker
I think that's one way in which we see these conditions playing out.
00:14:41
Speaker
And I guess the other way is in which the person who drug this child down the hallway was not a skilled person who was paid very much for her job, right?
00:14:54
Speaker
Like we don't value the care work
00:14:57
Speaker
of caring and teaching children with intellectual disabilities as much as we should either.
00:15:04
Speaker
So that was a situation where this person was completely over her head, right?
00:15:09
Speaker
And didn't have the skills and the training to deal with this situation that she was in.
00:15:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those situations where it's kind of a modern horror of society that it reminds me a lot.
00:15:21
Speaker
And often they're the same spaces as nursing homes and like senior care where you're hyper underpaid.
00:15:28
Speaker
It's one of the highest stress professions.
00:15:30
Speaker
But yet it's the place where many folks are going to be.
00:15:34
Speaker
And it's difficult to rationalize.
00:15:37
Speaker
getting those services I had mentioned before we started recording my my brother-in-law's autistic and requires constant supervision he's a lot of home care and something that we're looking at right now now that he's getting older he's in his 20s is like group homes or nursing homes or like spaces where he could go and live and be independent from his family while simultaneously receiving the care that he needs and it's
00:16:03
Speaker
way more difficult than you would expect.
00:16:05
Speaker
It's kind of shady, actually, in terms of being able to see what level of care they're getting, are people trained, and are they being, I suppose, abused as a result of these systems that have been set up.
00:16:22
Speaker
through, I guess, norming people in this fashion.
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:16:27
Speaker
And there's, you know, there's a pretty clear line, historical line that you can draw from the eugenics movement in the early 20th century and the institutionalization of people who were, I guess, at that time called feeble-minded, quote unquote, right?
00:16:47
Speaker
And those sorts of conditions today,
Systemic Issues and IEP Challenges
00:16:50
Speaker
right?
00:16:50
Speaker
So
00:16:51
Speaker
IQ tests in the early 20th century were used by someone like the American psychologist Henry Goddard, basically to identify kids who he felt shouldn't be in public schools, right?
00:17:04
Speaker
And to kind of take feeble-minded kids out of public schools and at least put them in a separate area.
00:17:10
Speaker
Classroom, you know, and this is basically what we have been struggling to overcome since since that moment.
00:17:18
Speaker
Right.
00:17:18
Speaker
The idea that kids who think differently have intellectual disabilities don't don't bring anything to the classroom.
00:17:28
Speaker
Right.
00:17:28
Speaker
That they they have nothing to contribute to that.
00:17:31
Speaker
environment, and it is so difficult to overcome that historically ingrained idea that the best thing to do is just to segregate that kid.
00:17:45
Speaker
It's even in the way that teachers are trained today, right?
00:17:50
Speaker
Like I've learned more and more about this, how the structure of teacher education, you know, rarely trains teachers to
00:17:58
Speaker
to teach all kinds of learners, right?
00:18:02
Speaker
General education teachers don't get a lot of training in teaching kids that learn different ways, right?
00:18:10
Speaker
And that's something we're still trying to kind of overcome in our education system today.
00:18:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, speaking from a classroom lens, one of the concerns that that we often focus a lot of our work at HRP on is that it tends to be that IEPs or any kind of difference from the norm
00:18:32
Speaker
a very, I suppose, neoliberal education system where you're just kind of rank and filed and put through what is becoming more common than not scripted curriculum or purchase curriculum that a teacher just kind of goes through.
00:18:46
Speaker
And as a result, students on IEPs or students who are just struggling generally with the content are offered almost like a doubling down of boring curriculum content to get them through it.
00:19:00
Speaker
So if a student is struggling with reading, well, let's just put them in the reading room for an extra two hours and maybe they'll catch up as opposed to examining.
00:19:11
Speaker
Well, why is the student maybe not wanting to read that material or are there different ways that they could read through an audio book?
00:19:17
Speaker
Like there's all these different capacities at which we could design curriculum for those at the margins that would benefit everyone.
00:19:24
Speaker
but yet has not been structurally examined because that's just the way the system has been set up for a very long time.
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:31
Speaker
I mean, and I have one thing I really observed and tried to write into the book was like the, the way that I saw teachers trying to battle the system, right?
00:19:44
Speaker
Like trying to set up
00:19:47
Speaker
certain ways in which Louisa can access the curriculum, but in a different kind of way, right?
00:19:53
Speaker
Like through audio books or through the same subject matter of the text, but say a kind of condensed text to read or, you know, things like this in which they are on their own, I feel like to figure it out.
00:20:09
Speaker
And it's not something that's systematized, but it's something that
00:20:14
Speaker
teachers are kind of weaving and stitching together to try to be the most, make the most humane classroom possible.
00:20:25
Speaker
And they're exhausted, right?
00:20:27
Speaker
Like it's exhausting to try to work in the margins of this and try to really kind of DIY an inclusive classroom together.
00:20:38
Speaker
That's again, something that
00:20:40
Speaker
I really realized by writing this book is that it's like, it's not as if teachers hate Louisa being in their classroom or something like, honestly, quite the contrary.
00:20:51
Speaker
It's, it's the exhaustion.
00:20:54
Speaker
And then it's just the system, right?
00:20:56
Speaker
Like they, they have to give her these standardized tests of all of the, because all kids take standardized tests way more than they need to in, in school.
00:21:08
Speaker
And it's not like,
00:21:10
Speaker
the teachers are particularly enthusiastic about the information that they provide either.
00:21:18
Speaker
Of course.
00:21:19
Speaker
Yeah, there's this cognitive dissonance where you want to push for folks to adapt the most radically inclusive environment that you can possibly create while simultaneously recognizing that
00:21:31
Speaker
that the folks that are the ones providing the curriculum are also in many ways equally dehumanized and professionalized.
00:21:39
Speaker
But at the end of the day, there's also the argument to be made that like, it's still someone's kid.
00:21:44
Speaker
So there's, there's like a level of,
00:21:48
Speaker
I guess, rebellion that almost needs to be offered by teachers.
00:21:52
Speaker
And speaking as a former teacher, it often feels this way, where you have to break some of the rules, recognizing that there's a human being in the room who's just not being treated fairly as a result of the system.
Vision for Inclusive Education
00:22:05
Speaker
But there are ways to work around those things.
00:22:07
Speaker
And you've already mentioned through, you know,
00:22:10
Speaker
through audiobooks or adaptations or condensing down text, etc.
00:22:14
Speaker
But I'm wondering what, in an ideal world, that would look like for you and your daughter to have a classroom that embraces something perhaps beyond a traditional IEP.
00:22:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good question because like the kind of change that we just talked about, the structural change is really hard.
00:22:37
Speaker
And I can't, you know, I can't imagine IQ tests going, going away.
00:22:45
Speaker
And, you know, also IEPs, like I mentioned, are generally good things, right?
00:22:50
Speaker
Like they are a document that is trying to help people.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yes, again, like IQ tests aren't going away, but I also think that we can change what we think we're learning from IQ tests.
00:23:07
Speaker
And I've seen and talked to psychologists that are actually doing this.
00:23:12
Speaker
There's ways of
00:23:15
Speaker
looking at the more granular information that an IQ test can give you.
00:23:20
Speaker
So not really the overall IQ score, but information gleaned from the like 15 subtests that make up most IQ tests.
00:23:31
Speaker
And, you know, think about rather than that information telling us something about a person's deficiency, right?
00:23:40
Speaker
Or a kind of
00:23:41
Speaker
how far away they are from normal, what they can't do, all of the ways in which I am presented with information about my daughter on IQ tests and IEPs, thinking and emphasizing, what could we change about the environment, right?
00:23:59
Speaker
Like what, clearly this person is having trouble with this particular skill.
00:24:04
Speaker
What could change
00:24:06
Speaker
so that this becomes more accessible, the environment becomes more accessible for somebody, say, that has a hard time reading and then answering deeply interpretive and analytical questions about a text.
00:24:22
Speaker
Like how could that skill be expressed in a different way rather than thinking about like a deficiency that needs to be made up
00:24:34
Speaker
with a kid.
00:24:35
Speaker
And honestly, I'm not really interested in making up a deficiency for my kid.
00:24:41
Speaker
I don't think Louisa should be thought about in terms of deficiency.
00:24:44
Speaker
She is who she is.
00:24:46
Speaker
And it's the structure in the system that I would like to see changed and then emphasize in changing environment rather than thinking about changing her.
00:24:58
Speaker
I'm sure part of that is just moving away from that hyper
00:25:03
Speaker
on productivity and workplace preparation.
00:25:07
Speaker
And it's not to say that those things don't matter at all, but the way that schooling is set up is certainly sort of only in that lane.
00:25:16
Speaker
And something that really struck me in the book is you mentioned about how perhaps what's not captured by something like an IQ test or by grading or whatever that might be
00:25:24
Speaker
For example, your daughter is the first one that wants to go up and sing karaoke in the lunchroom, which is a valuable human skill.
00:25:31
Speaker
It's something that people want to see.
00:25:32
Speaker
It's creative.
00:25:33
Speaker
It's fun.
00:25:34
Speaker
And if we lived in a world where we weren't so job focused, that would be something that would be encouraged and perhaps even like tested.
00:25:44
Speaker
Like we would get into I'm not advocating for testing for more things, but it would be something that would be a valid indicator of the success of a school or the success of a culture would be how do we include everyone, but also how do we celebrate together and socialize together and all these other, I guess, more like hippie things that should matter to us as a society.
00:26:05
Speaker
Sure.
00:26:05
Speaker
Right.
00:26:06
Speaker
Like call them hippie things.
00:26:07
Speaker
I don't care.
00:26:08
Speaker
I still want to see them around valuing things like community, valuing learning about each other, valuing care and helping each other.
00:26:19
Speaker
All of those things can be valued too.
00:26:21
Speaker
And again, like, I don't mean we should all move to a kibitz and, you know, a
00:26:28
Speaker
live in peace and harmony with the world, even though that would be nice.
00:26:31
Speaker
I would just like to see things, other things valued a little bit more instead of constantly being bombarded with information about my daughter's deficiencies in these kinds of documents.
00:26:47
Speaker
But, you know, like there are other ways, too, that even if we're not talking specifically about the case of somebody with an IEP and an intellectual disability, like these tests and the constant measuring of mastery and intelligence has changed the way that we think of what learning is, right?
00:27:11
Speaker
Like learning is done to do well on a test.
00:27:15
Speaker
And that is...
00:27:17
Speaker
That is, I think, what we see college students understand about learning when they come to my classrooms in college.
00:27:26
Speaker
And honestly, I didn't quite understand where that idea came from, where they're just so interested in the grade as the final indicator of one's learning that
00:27:42
Speaker
I didn't really understand where that idea came from until I saw it emerging in the way that my daughter is being educated.
00:27:49
Speaker
And it's like, oh, I see.
00:27:51
Speaker
It's from the online grade books.
00:27:53
Speaker
That's why they're so paranoid about their grades.
00:27:57
Speaker
And this quantitative understanding of learning has just, I think, really depleted the idea of learning for everybody.
00:28:10
Speaker
I mean, it's one of those things that it wouldn't be hyperbolic for me to say that I think I've spoken now to hundreds of professors and something that pretty much every professor has told me is exactly what you just said.
00:28:23
Speaker
Kids that are coming into my class, especially people that teach freshmen, are like, hey, all they do is care about getting a good grade.
00:28:30
Speaker
No one actually wants to learn anything anymore.
00:28:32
Speaker
But yet...
00:28:33
Speaker
There's a grand irony because whenever we work with K-12 educators, which is primarily what we do, we hear, well, this all sounds great about moving away from grades, but colleges really want to see the stuff on paper.
00:28:44
Speaker
They want to see kids focusing on getting all A's.
00:28:47
Speaker
There's this breakdown of communication where both folks are kind of pointing the finger the other way.
00:28:53
Speaker
But ultimately, we know via research, but also anecdotally from talking to young people, that kids who focus more on learning
00:29:01
Speaker
not only understand more than kids that focus on grades, they actually end up ironically getting higher grades.
Lifelong Learning and Educational Change
00:29:08
Speaker
So if we focus less on the grading element, kids end up learning more, which is paradoxical in many regards.
00:29:17
Speaker
But the way that you get there is in part by focusing on ensuring that every single kid has a way to represent their learning in a way that makes sense to them.
00:29:25
Speaker
So like a universal design for learning.
00:29:31
Speaker
seat at the table.
00:29:32
Speaker
So not always pulling the student out whenever things get more difficult.
00:29:37
Speaker
Instead, it's, well, why is there a situation in the classroom that's designed that only one set of students can learn there?
00:29:44
Speaker
And that isn't to say that it's all on a teacher to figure that out, but certainly like researching and understanding things like UDL or even like project-based learning.
00:29:58
Speaker
with a seat at the, at the table.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:30:02
Speaker
And this was something I really had to overcome in the book is that like, I, I'm a college professor and I've stayed in college because I am, I am good at, at school in a way that I find annoying now from what, what I know.
00:30:17
Speaker
And it's just really,
00:30:21
Speaker
hard, I think, to undo the kind of validation and the meaning in that validation that one gets when they do do well in school the way that it's set up, right?
00:30:36
Speaker
That person doesn't mean that they're more valuable or more worthy or even smarter.
00:30:42
Speaker
It just means that you learn in a way that's school-like.
00:30:47
Speaker
But there's other ways to learn.
00:30:49
Speaker
And if we
00:30:50
Speaker
just thought of school as like one offering perhaps a too narrow definition of what it means to learn and be a lifelong learner, which is I think what we want for all of our kids, then I think that would really help us to make educational opportunities more equitable.
00:31:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:11
Speaker
And perhaps if it were to influence folks more
00:31:14
Speaker
something to be considered is that the way that that educational kind of racetrack is currently working is not going to keep working.
00:31:24
Speaker
Kids that are really good at school, arguably, are not being set up for success in the future in many regards.
00:31:30
Speaker
If I chase all A's, I get all A's, I go to college, you go on that, what William Dreschowitz calls the zombification process, where you're just lurching from step to step, and then you graduate, and then you have a midlife crisis because you're
00:31:44
Speaker
don't really see what the purpose of any of that was, but you also never took time to reflect and consider
00:31:50
Speaker
why am I doing these things?
00:31:52
Speaker
Or what happens when I don't get that validation and now I'm just out in the quote unquote real world doing real things.
00:31:59
Speaker
And I would like to imagine, I suppose it's semi-utopian, but what would a world look like where people didn't have to go through that sorting mechanism or feel like they have to be validated by their narrow stream of intelligence, but instead were put toward more purposeful tasks, K-12, into college,
00:32:19
Speaker
and how much that would change the world to be living in a society like that.
00:32:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:25
Speaker
I, I, I wonder, I mean, and I'm just thinking now about that, that like hoop between K-12 and college, which is like SAT and standardized tests, right?
00:32:38
Speaker
Like that's, that's I imagine when you said like K through 12,
00:32:44
Speaker
Teachers think that college wants good grades and is very grade-focused.
00:32:51
Speaker
There's that model of the SAT that stands in between those two worlds and is something that developed out of IQ tests in the 1980s.
00:33:01
Speaker
1920s.
00:33:02
Speaker
And yeah, like it would, I think our society is just set up in such ingrained ways to value competition, to value independence, to value comparing yourself
00:33:17
Speaker
to others and understanding where you belong in relation to how you compare to other people, that it would be a utopian idea for sure, but also incredibly hard to let go of those things.
00:33:35
Speaker
And, you know, I don't think...
00:33:37
Speaker
I don't think society has to change that dramatically to give more more access to to people that don't do well in in
Advocacy and Future Hopes
00:33:48
Speaker
school.
00:33:48
Speaker
You know, I mentioned in the book as well how there are about more than 300 now programs for higher education for people with intellectual disabilities these days.
00:34:00
Speaker
So these kinds of programs that have been set up to give give people access
00:34:05
Speaker
To to higher education.
00:34:08
Speaker
And, you know, one thing I kind of realized in my my book is like, that's that's really where the learning's at.
00:34:14
Speaker
Right.
00:34:14
Speaker
Like, because those programs aren't worried about grades so much.
00:34:20
Speaker
They're they're not worried about admissions.
00:34:24
Speaker
test scores to get into these programs.
00:34:28
Speaker
And there's a real concentrated sense of purpose and meaning about those kinds of learning opportunities that I think I don't see as much in mainstream higher education.
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, all of that's absolutely fascinating.
00:34:47
Speaker
And it's just really, I suppose, inspiring to have an entire book slash research, almost like a research methodology on IQ testing, all as a result of personal experience that you've had.
00:35:00
Speaker
And I'm wondering, as we run short on time here, I suppose, like, what are the next steps?
00:35:06
Speaker
Like, what are you hoping folks take away from this personally?
00:35:10
Speaker
Are there any things that you're now working on as a result of this book?
00:35:13
Speaker
Where do we go from here?
00:35:14
Speaker
I would hope, I hope people take from the book, I hope people and teachers that have, you know, various kinds of interactions in their life with people with intellectual disabilities, whether that is no interaction to lots of interaction, just to
00:35:32
Speaker
to think about how the way that we think about intelligence is made through human choices in history, right?
00:35:40
Speaker
I think that alone is a very powerful idea because it suggests that we could make other choices that are different and change that history.
00:35:53
Speaker
And I don't think that happens overnight, but I do think that we've seen that happen
00:35:59
Speaker
And in other cases, like I can think of the civil rights movement and even the disability rights movement as being good examples of that.
00:36:09
Speaker
And two, I think as long as we sort of devalue
00:36:15
Speaker
intelligence test scores, and devalue the kinds of characteristics that we associate with intelligence test scores, we could make the world better for everyone.
00:36:30
Speaker
And, you know, I guess I would say now, like writing that book has, and my daughter in general, has radically changed the way that I think about the world and what I care about in the world.
00:36:43
Speaker
And I am,
00:36:46
Speaker
working with some of my colleagues here in Miami to start a program at Miami University for people with intellectual disabilities.
00:36:55
Speaker
So hopefully my daughter could maybe go to college here one day if she if she wanted to.
00:37:02
Speaker
And also working on
00:37:04
Speaker
advocating at the governmental level for changing things, changing laws that segregate people with intellectual disabilities and make it more difficult for them to find employment once they're out of school and working on things like that now.
00:37:22
Speaker
That's beautiful, Pepper.
00:37:24
Speaker
I really appreciate the work.
00:37:26
Speaker
I appreciate you joining us on the podcast and talking with us today.
00:37:29
Speaker
Thanks so much, Chris.
00:37:30
Speaker
I loved being here.
00:37:31
Speaker
Thanks for the conversation.
00:37:35
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:37:38
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:37:42
Speaker
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00:37:46
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:37:53
Speaker
Thank you.