ut genetic capabilities, but they all seem unconvincing. Maybe improvements in health care mean that our brains are in better physical condition. Maybe the media barrage and information overload that characterize our time are stimulating our neuron connections, making for improved mental agility.
But if our children, across the board, are really near geniuses, one would never guess it. Only 32 percent of American fourth-graders can read at or above the "proficient" level. Another 37 percent cannot even attain a "basic" level of reading. American high-schoolers are falling behind the Third World when it comes to math and science. In the third International Mathematics and Science study, American young people finished 19th out of 38 countries in math, and 18th in science.
Academic achievement has been stagnating or getting worse for decades, despite huge infusions of money and new ideas. Part of the problem is surely the dumbed-down curriculum. The average child with an IQ of 100 in 1932 had far more challenging textbooks, more demanding assignments, and harder teachers-all of which turned him into a far better reader and writer-than his "near genius" grandchild.
Such a "near genius" may well find cutting and pasting, getting in touch with his feelings, and exploring cultural diversity to be paralyzingly uninteresting. He may well have trouble even paying attention. His mind is always racing, but it is never engaged.
Such children today are often diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder and doped up with Ritalin to slow down their racing minds. Teachers know the stories: A bright kid keeps getting into trouble. A little girl won't take part in class because she just withdraws into herself. A black teenager may fail English but display dazzling virtuosity with language when he improvises complexly rhyming raps on the schoolyard.
Whether or not the IQ gap contributes to such problems requires more research, but children are capable of more than we realize, as the performance of many homeschoolers makes clear.
The IQ gap has emotional, cultural, and spiritual implications as well. If an idle mind is the Devil's playground, what happens in the mind that is idling at full speed? There is a darkness, a cynicism to youth culture-evident in music, language, and social life-that suggests sharp minds going unfulfilled, channeled instead into destructive or despairing nihilism. Without beliefs or ideals, having never been exposed to wisdom, meaning, or truth, the intelligence of many teens has nothing to work on, their searching intellects have nothing to think about, and they find themselves lost in the vast spaces of their minds.