Reply to My 4 Yr Old Son's FSIQ is 131, Now What?

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Reply to "My 4 Yr Old Son's FSIQ is 131, Now What?"

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[quote=Anonymous]Does it matter?

In a way, I think that's where the whole IQ debate is going.  Basically, everybody has seriously untapped mental capacity.  The challenge is to get people to use theirs.  It's hard to tell whether people who are smart start out with more capacity, use more of what they have,  develop additional capacity through use (and neuroscientists seem pretty inclined at this point to believe that's at least part of the equation) or some combination of all of the above.  By the time we get to the point where we think we can measure intelligence, environment has already played a major role in shaping it.

For me, two striking things have come out of the research on gifted kids/gifted education.  One is that IQ doesn't predict achievement in a straightforward way -- it may help you pick out the best students, but it doesn't help you identify the true geniuses at an early stage.  And the second is that the same types of education/curriculum recommended for gifted kids also benefit "non-gifted" kids.  Bottom line, from my POV:  IQ doesn't measure what we're interested in (how you put your brain to work/what you can/will accomplish with it) and conventional schooling in the US isn't maximizing anyone's potential for learning.

I'm the product of a different era and of public schools, so I've BTDT with gifted education/emphasis on IQ.  It's interesting for me to watch my DC who seems every bit as smart as I am/was (maybe more -- she's growing up in an even more enriched environment!) and whose progressive private school experience takes all the labelling and tracking issues off the table.  I honestly think that she (and her peers) are getting a better education than I did as a result.  [/quote]

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