More from Geoffrey Miller:
“This overt contempt for the concept of intelligence has never undermined our universal worship of the intelligence-based meritocracy that drives capitalist educational and occupational aspirations. All parents glow with pride when their children score well on standardized tests, get into elite universities that require high test scores, and pursue careers that require elite university degrees.
If I say on a second date that “the sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term,” I am basically saying “my SAT scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my IQ is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.”
General intelligence is such a powerful predictor of job performance that a content-free IQ guarantee can be much more valuable to an employer or graduate school than a set of rote-learned content with no IQ guarantee. This clarifies many otherwise puzzling aspects of higher education, such as the common early-twentieth-century view that “a gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it.” At least my Latin teachers at Walnut Hills High School (Cincinnati, Ohio) were open about why we had to learn to read Vir gil: familiarity with Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes would boost our SAT vocabulary test scores. You know some costly signaling is going on when thousands of teenagers spend three years each learning a long-dead language just so they’ll score better on an IQ test that pretends it’s not an IQ test, so they can spend four more years and a hundred thousand dollars to get a college degree that pretends it’s not an IQ guarantee.
The human-capital view argues that education actually confers “added value” on students, making them better workers and citizens who are more useful to society by transforming latent talents into manifest skills and knowledge. A problem with this view is that there are much more efficient ways to learn career-relevant skills and facts: through reading books, watching documentaries, talking with experts, and finding mentors. In Good Will Hunting, the title character, a self-educated genius, mocks the Harvard students: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” Charles William Eliot, Harvard’s president from 1869 to 1909, admitted, “One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long”—as long as it was the right five feet, such as the fifty volumes of Harvard Classics that he edited. The massive rise in homeschooling shows that many parents have come to realize that learning, especially below the college level, need not depend on credentialed schools."