'By dismissing intelligence‐based theories of social mobility so casually, sociologists have for years avoided having to grapple with the evidence or address the arguments. Instead, they attack as ‘ideological' any attempt to suggest that intelligence might be linked to social positions, and anyone who takes this possibility seriously is accused of bad faith. Leading French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, insists, for example: ‘The ideology of giftedness, the cornerstone of the whole educational and social system, helps to enclose the under‐privileged classes in the role which society has given them by making them see as natural inability things which are only a result of an inferior social status.' Similarly, two of the most influential writers on the American class system reassure us that the ‘true function' of IQ testing lies in ‘legitimating the social institutions underpinning the stratification system itself'.
Researchers who have insisted on the importance of intelligence have been marginalised, or even banned from speaking or writing. The respected political economist, James Heckman, notes that linking IQ to achievement has ‘become “taboo” in respectable academic discourse', and he warns that it is ‘folly' for any scholar looking to publish in peer‐reviewed journals or to apply for peer‐reviewed research funding, to pursue this line of inquiry. This is borne out to some extent by my own experiences, but others have fared much worse. In Britain, Hans Eysenck, a pioneer of research on IQ, was banned by the National Union of Students from speaking on university campuses during the 1970s, and in 1996, The g factor, written by an Edinburgh psychologist, Chris Brand, was withdrawn by the publisher on the grounds that it made ‘assertions which we find repellent'.'
Peter Saunders
