Educational Media Reviews Online

The Intelligence Quotient or I.Q. as most of us remember it was the quintessential tool used to rate and promote intelligence for most of us growing up as children. I can remember taking such a test and feeling very uncomfortable because I was tested three times; the rest of my classmates went through the process once. From that moment on, I have always had a negative impression of these kinds of tests. If you scored high on the I.Q. test the better for you in terms of education, smarts and your future. This video looks at the history of the ‘intelligence quotient’ starting with Ellis Island and the tests given there for immigrants entering the United States as well as the controversial and racist commentaries from well-known psychologists during the early mid 1960’s and 1970’s and how its supposedly empirical assumptions were used to exploit and to a degree guarantee ethnic purity around the world. While the narrator is clearly British, the discussions concerning the use of the I.Q. assessment test clearly illustrates that there is far too much information to know in our global society for any test such as this to measure intelligence adequately. Herein lays the ‘deceit’ imposed on certain groups and ethnicities via these so-called intelligence tests. This film makes for an interesting discussion on the concept of intelligence and how it should be measured, rather than using it as a tool exploit certain populations around the world.