Outliers Lewis Terman Analysis

Lewis Terman believed that IQ was the determining factor in any one person’s life - it would decide how successful they would be, how many awards they would receive and scholarly papers they would write, how well their future job might pay. He tested and gathered the most measurably intelligent children he could find - “gifted” individuals - and studied them over the course of their lives to observe how far they would go. The outcome of that study, and how Terman’s idea has created and influenced gifted programs for children in the United States, will show that not only does the gifted classification serve no long-term purpose, but it also tends to hurt the upcoming generations more than it helps them, creating a faulty dichotomy within the education system. Malcolm Gladwell disproves the idea of IQ determining success in his book Outliers, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from believing it. On page 79, he argues that, “The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point,” meaning that once a person reaches a certain level of measurable intelligence, anything beyond that

The original intent was to raise an educated populace that would have the ability to create a sound civilization, would be able to select capable leaders, and would gradually raise the standard of living across society. Heather Wolpert-Gawron, for an article from the Huffington Post, asked 300 people of different careers to share in thirty words what the purpose of education was to them. Nowhere in those answers did anyone suggest it was to pick out the smartest of the lot and test the chosen extensively in order to measure our ability as a nation and hold it against others. No. The true purpose, to these 300, was to develop a student’s skills and their potential, to raise critical thinkers and