Sian Silverhair

Bleargh.

I just responded to a comment on the Furtopia forums. The topic was effectively "Tennessee officials are fucktarded for wanting to ban gays".

Azura_Gerbil wrote:

They should ban stupid people from breeding.

I agree, but there are many flaws in such a law. How will we tell who is stupid? Pulling names out of a hat? No, you'd probably be picking a few smart people off too. Judging on their grades in school? Hell, I failed miserably in school and there's no denying that I actually use my brain.

So how do we find out? Why, an IQ test of course!

Massachussetts has a standardized test called the MCAS. It's taken in 4th, 8th, and 10th grade. The first two times are practice and the third allows you to get your high school diploma. If you fail the third, you have to retake it in Spring. Failing that, you have to keep taking it until your senior year, and if you still fail you get a Certificate of Attendance. This kind of system is exactly what I think of when I hear "IQ Test". Allow me to use my own experiences with this system and apply it to the question at hand.

Writing test questions like this can be a difficult thing. You want as many kids as possible to pass because that makes your state look good. It makes people think you have a lot of smart kids in your schools. At the same time, you need to weed out the stupid ones (but the retards can't fail, either, because that's descriminatory!). So what do you do?

Instead of actually improving the schools to increase the collective intelligence output, the teachers are given a guidebook that effectively "teaches to the test" -- in other words, they change technique instead of actual curriculum and the test dumbs itself down. There are also remedial classes a potential failure can take in order to improve test-taking skills.

So basically... if everyone passes, the parents are happy and don't shove burning coals down the administration's collective throat. And the school looks real good, too.

Results can be skewed by only publishing numbers. The MCAS people do not give you a copy of the test you took when you recieve your results -- it's simply "pass or fail". Doing this allows you to change numbers depending on your political agenda -- a wealthy school with a new building might appear "smarter" than a poorer area with an older building, instead of actually looking at the curriculum. But that's a story for another day.

So, with that little example in mind... would a system to ban stupid people from breeding (or anything) like this actually work? And if not, what would work?

And do you know what everyone's going to say if a bill like this were actually proposed?

"That's descriminatory!"