10% of the population has an IQ lower than 83, what this means

You need to look up a book Deschooling Society. It was first published in 1970, before Mark Zuckerberg was even a twinkle in his daddy's eye and it remains relevant today as why we maybe shouldn't send our kids off to a violent prison for the most formative years of their lives

 

Hyperbole is a lazy excuse for a position.

 

Read the book. It's on PDF I believe, or your local library should have a copy

 

I don’t need to. I know exactly what goes on in the public schools.

 

Oh? and how do you know this?

 

I’m a public school teacher.

 

And you approve of the way they are being run now?

 

They are not all run the same way, of course. But it sounds like you have a bigger issue than that.

 

I can't help but think that a network of subject matter mentors and applied internships might be much better at educating our children, an awful lot cheaper as well, though that isn't my main concern.

 

And what is your training, education, or experience in the field?

 

No, ALL children do.

The perception that some don't, is adult convenience and self-indulgence. As in "I don't want to have to maintain a stable, productive, and predictable life, so I'll just tell everyone my kids don't care for same".

 

A child's experience of school is almost entirely a product of the parenting they receive. Schools are NOT the problem.

 

This is a common myth, and is no doubt put forward with kindly intent.

In fact, perfomance on IQ tests correlates closely with success in life, longevity, speed of reflexes. You're better off being born poor, and very intelligent, than rich, and very stupid.

No one really believes that IQ does not mean very much. If you were seriously ill, and had the choice of being treated by a doctor with an IQ of 90, or one with an IQ of 140 -- you KNOW which one you would choose.

What is true is that material conditions can affect the general IQ of a population, and so we shouldn't say "nothing can be done, we're prisoners of our biologically-determined IQ". IQ has actually been increasing, on average, over the last few decades. (But see further.) [As someone pointed out above, the tests have to be re-normed, in order to keep mean --"average" -- IQ at 100. So someone with an IQ of 85 today would have had an IQ of 100 five decades ago. More importantly, IQ is not everything -- moral character is far more important. There is a tendency of higher-IQ people to assume they have some sort of virtue that lower-IQ people do not have. Not so.]

We have seen many civilizations rise and flourish, and then stagnate and decline. Go to Guatemala today and you'll find a low-IQ population. But these people are descendants of the Mayas, who were on the road to high civilization -- they created a positional-exponential numbering system, for example, and had a written language -- when something happened. (Here, the Europeans, for once, are not to blame. Apparently their decline was something to do with the environment, perhaps unwittingly self-inflicted.)

Furthermore, as we discover the genetic basis for IQ -- and progress here is rapid -- we have the prospect, within a few more generations, of choosing the IQ of our descendants.

In the meantime, here is something to worry about, which contradicts the well-known "Flynn Effect" (The mean IQ has been going up by about 3 points per decade.)
See here.