MENSA WORKING PEOPLE | 2006-10-15
I almost flunked out of high school. Two things saved me. First of all my mother had had a year of college and she had been a public school teacher in the 1920s. The other was a special characteristic of the backward State of South Carolina in the benighted age of segregation when everybody else was smarter than we were.
South Carolina has the highest proportion of military veterans among all the states in the Union. It has been that way since I was born. That proportion has always been even higher than the Volunteer State of Tennessee. When the GI Bill of Rights came in at the end of World War II, this presented a problem. A lot of vets qualified for the GI Bill of Rights but they hadn't finished, or even gone to, high school.
This was before we had the GED, where a person above 19 years of age could take a test and get the equivalent of a high school diploma. Back then, what we now call the SAT was called the National College Boards. The University of South Carolina wanted to say that anyone who passed the National College Boards, which, after all, were NATIONAL, could enter the University of South Carolina.
The national accreditation board went berserk. If a university down in what they called "peanut" and "hillbilly" country were allowed to do that, it would destroy the value of a high school diploma, which they also accredited. They threatened to take away South Carolina's accreditation if it adopted that rule.
On the other hand, the University was not about to keep thousands of self-educated veterans out of school if they didn't spend years going back to high school. So a compromise was reached. The University adopted a rule that a person who scored in the TOP QUARTER of the national college boards could enter whether he had had any formal schooling or not. So the national accreditation group accepted that.
My mother knew that the reason I was almost failing out of high school at ages fifteen and sixteen was because I was bored into helplessness. So she arranged for me to take an intelligence test. That was before my drinking days, so My IQ was out of sight. That convinced my father to let me go ahead, take the College Board exam at sixteen, and go to the University.
If my mother had not been a teacher or if I were anywhere but South Carolina, I would have flunked out of high school. I had already done plenty of manual and skilled work on our brick plant, so I would have become a skilled worker.
Whenever Mensa, the high-IQ group, is discussed, reporters always comment on the large number of manual laborers who belong to it. There are, of course, endless numbers more who would qualify but it never occurs to them to try. If you're not "educated" you're not supposed to be smart.
So, besides my being raised with working people in Pontiac, South Carolina, there is this other reason I am able to deal with leaders of grassroots, working-class protests. I respect them, and it shows. So they trust me.
Let me add one more part of my history which shows just how smart these "educated" people are. When I was flunking out of high school, there were national SUBJECT tests. That is, all the students in selected schools throughout the country who were just finishing a course in basic algebra or second year history or whatever were tested on their knowledge of the subject in order to compare teaching nationwide. Columbia High School, which I attended the last two years of my high school career, was one of the schools in that national test.
My teachers always made damned sure that I was part of the group taking EACH of those subject tests. I made them look good. In every single subject I scored above 95% in subject knowledge, and usually at 99%, compared to the NATIONAL average, including the much-publicized, highly financed schools with rich kids in New England. I was specifically selected as the shining example of a South Carolinian who learned all about the subjects in our poorly-financed school system which was forty-eighth in the ranking of forty-eight states.
The SAME teachers who insisted that I show how much I knew about each subject were the SAME teachers who gave me Cs and Ds in their courses!! They were following the grading techniques Mommy Professor had given them in college.
It never once occurred to a single one of these teachers that there was something wrong here! The fact I was their star example of someone who knew the subject and that they were giving me low to failing marks never struck them as the slightest contradiction. It never even occurred to them that there was something wrong with what Mommy Professor had taught them.
And that, boys and girls, is what I mean by Militant Ignorance.