A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother's Reckoning with the IQ Test

Author Pepper Stetler will be at the library to talk about her book A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother's Reckoning with the IQ Test. A professor of art history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, she writes extensively on issues facing people with intellectual disabilities and their caregivers.

Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate and other venues.

In a quest to advocate for her daughter, Pepper Stetler uncovers the dark history of IQ tests that leads her to question what exactly we are measuring when we measure intelligence.

When Pepper Stetler was told that her daughter, Louisa, who has Down syndrome, would be regularly required to take IQ tests to secure support in school, she asked a simple question: why? In questioning the authority and relevance of the test, Stetler sets herself on a winding, often dark, investigation into how the IQ test came to be the irrefutable standard for measuring intelligence. The unsettling history causes Stetler to wonder what influence this test will have over her daughter’s future, and, if its genesis is so mired in eugenics, whether Louisa should take it at all.

Blending a mother’s love and dedication to her daughter with incisive historical and cultural analysis. A MEASURE OF INTELLIGENCE investigates the origins and influence of the IQ test on our modern education system, questions how we define and judge intelligence, challenges its flawed foundation and argues for a fundamental reevaluation of how we understand an individual’s perceived potential.