If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll share my personal crusade. Intelligence tests were never designed to measure Intelligence. They measured how successful the people taking them would be in school.

All those word puzzles on tests? They measure how much your parents read to you (or encouraged you to read) so the school doesn’t have to waste time bringing you up to speed. The math problems measure how well you can pay attention to a boring class.

My husband is brilliant. But has the math skills of a 6th grader. He hated school and kept falling asleep, so he completely lost the thread of mathematics.

My good friend is also extremely intelligent. She learns the rules to complex board games easily, and can explain them to others (not a common skill). Her spatial understanding is off the charts high. But she was convinced for most of her life that she was stupid. Because she takes longer to think about something instead of blurting out the first thing that comes to her.

The first IQ test correctly identified you as someone who would have trouble in school. Not because you were stupid, but because you would ask questions. You wouldn’t just accept what you were told if you didn’t understand why.

Rather than assume kids are stupid, let’s assume if they score poorly, they need a different kind of schooling to develop to their full potential. There’s plenty of competing educational theories out there.

In fact, instead of giving kids an IQ test, we should give them a test of their educational proclivities, so they can be put in the best school for them. I shudder to think of how I might have turned out, if I’d been in one of those schools that measures success by how well you work in a team. I’d probably have been in remedial classes my entire life.