Les Normaliens

Ecole Normale

The Board of Ed instituted a tracking system in the 50s. The Stanford-Binet IQ test was administered to elementary school students who were placed either in the IG or "intellectually gifted" classes or on increasingly lower rungs of the totem pole. Class performance and grades were seldom factors. In England you had the O Levels until l988 and in France an even more selective criteria for those lucky students who become Normaliens and attend the Ecole normale superieure. North Korea undoubtedly has a similar program for those who will make their ICBMs. Either you think of yourself as naturally talented or not. For those who don't score well on standardized tests, the struggle for recognition can be elusive. Intelligence and particularly creativity don't always register in formulaic ways and a student with great potential whose mind blanked when confronted with a series of shapes may find it more difficult--at first. Reports about anomalies, of course, are, by definition, anecdotal since they aren't scored. How do you record the performance of someone with a low IQ who goes on to find a cure for cancer or an outsider artist like Darger? But whoever said life or death were fair?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn 

and read "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star