Two children take the same test. One grew up with books, time, and a parent who could read to them every night. The other grew up with a parent working two jobs, a home full of stress, and no room for any of that. When the scores come back, we call one child “gifted” and the other “average”. We treat the result as proof of something fixed inside them, something they were simply born with. But what if the test is not measuring what we think it is?
For most of us, IQ scores carry a huge amount of weight. We treat them as a mirror that reflects a child’s natural ability, a ceiling they cannot rise above. But the more interesting question is not what the score is, but what the test is really measuring. Is it capturing something biological and fixed? Or is it measuring the quality of support and opportunity a child’s environment provided? And more broadly, is “intelligence” even the predetermined thing we assume it to be, or is it a concept that has always served a particular kind of power?
New research in child development and cognitive science pushes back against the idea that success lives purely inside a person’s head. Human potential, it turns out, grows out of the relationship between the brain, the body, and the world around us. To understand why some children fall behind, we have to accept that a family’s financial situation is not just about money. It shapes the very conditions in which a child’s mind develops. And those financial situations did not appear from nowhere. People built them, often deliberately, over generations.
Before going further, it is worth pausing on the concept of intelligence itself, because the idea has some significant flaws. The IQ test was never meant to measure deep, inborn ability. Researchers in early 20th century France created it simply to identify which children needed extra help at school. But the idea of ranking human minds did not stay neutral for long.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European colonial powers used early intelligence science to justify their rule over other people. They argued that certain races were naturally less intelligent and therefore needed Europeans to govern, educate, and civilize them. These were not mainstream beliefs. Universities taught them. Governments used them to design colonial education systems that actively tore out local knowledge, local languages, and local ways of thinking.
The damage was not only political. When you strip away a community’s language and replace its institutions with foreign ones, you destroy the very environments that allow minds to develop. Colonial education did not aim to unlock potential. It aimed to produce a specific kind of worker and to make European-style reasoning look like the only valid form of intelligence.
That legacy still shapes test scores today. The psychologist Howard Gardner argued that human intelligence is not one thing at all, but at least 8 different kinds of ability, including linguistic, spatial, musical, and interpersonal skills. A single number cannot capture any of that. Even more telling is what researchers call the “Flynn Effect“. Average IQ scores rose dramatically throughout the 20th century. Someone who scored “average” in 1930 would fall below average by today’s standards. This did not happen because people became biologically smarter. It happened because environments changed, and with them, the kinds of thinking people practiced every day. What IQ tests largely measure is how comfortable someone is with a specific style of abstract problem-solving. Certain environments teach that style better than others. Those environments are not evenly distributed and they never have been.
This leads to one of the most damaging stories we tell about inequality: that poorer parents are simply less engaged or less capable. But the research says otherwise. Parents from lower-income households are not doing a worse job. They are doing the same job with far fewer resources.
Two things drive how much a child develops. The first is the warmth and consistency of parenting. Money strongly shapes this, because financial stability reduces stress, and stress makes patient, positive parenting much harder. The second is the time parents spend in meaningful activities like reading, talking, and playing together. Education shapes this more than income does. The problem is not the parents. The problem is the absence of support that would allow them to parent the way they want to. And the people who design those support systems, or choose not to, overwhelmingly come from the group that has always scored well on the tests.
That last point deserves to be said plainly. The people who run governments, lead institutions, set education policy, and control research funding tend to be those who performed well within the existing system. This creates a vicious cycle. The system rewards a particular kind of mind shaped by a particular kind of privilege. The people it produces then look at the top and see themselves, so they conclude the system is fair.
Meanwhile, those who were denied that support hear that their lower scores reflect their lower potential. In reality, those scores reflect the lower investment their environments received. Power protects itself by mistaking its own advantages for intelligence.
Grasping why the environment matters so much means letting go of the assumption that everything important about a person happens inside their brain. Thinking and learning do not happen in isolation inside a skull. They happen through the whole body, through doing and interacting, and through the support structures the world provides. Cognitive scientists call this “3E Cognition“, which stands for embodied, enacted, and environmentally supported. The mind needs the world in order to work well. When a child struggles in school, something in the environment is usually failing them, not the other way around. Colonial and post-colonial environments have been especially effective at creating that kind of mismatch, tearing out indigenous support structures and replacing them with systems built for someone else.
All of this research points to something both simple and deeply political. The “hidden blueprint” of a child’s potential is not written only in their genes. Of course, none of this denies that intelligence can have biological roots or that some people begin life with inherent abilities. It simply reminds us that beginnings are not destinies. Intelligence and character are not fixed gifts that some children are lucky enough to receive. They are shaped by the support, time, and resources societies choose to provide. When we keep using standardized tests to judge children’s futures while ignoring the conditions that shaped those scores, we are not measuring potential. We are measuring the long reach of old power structures and calling it talent.
If we already know that the right support, at the right time, can close most of these gaps, why have we built a world that makes that support so hard to access, and then called the result a fair test?
As someone who has taken countless IQ tests to enter programs, secure jobs, or pursue academia, I have always questioned their validity. Which is why I took a deep dive into the topic. It could have definitely been longer, but I kept this article short and sweet. Feel free to read more in the sources and further reading below.
A Comprehensive History of IQ Tests – Robert
A History of Research on Intelligence – Robert J. Sternberg
Cultural Explorations of Human Intelligence Around the World – Robert J. Sternberg
Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance And Inequality? Differences-in-Differences Evidence Across Countries – Eric A. Hanushek & Ludger Wossmann
Educational tracking and long-term outcomes by social origin: Seven countries in comparison – Steffen Schindler et al.
Eugenics and Scientific Racism
Historical and Contemporary Conceptions of Intelligence: Limitations and Biases – Cole Davies, Marshall Martin and Orlanda South
Historical Survey And Theories Of Intelligence
How Meritocracy Worsens Inequality—and Makes Even the Rich Miserable
How Tracking Creates a Poverty of Learning – Mary Hatwood Futrell & Joel Gomez
Intelligence And Diversity: A Western And Eastern View From A Global Paradigm – Stefanie Denise Wilson & Bahaudin G. Mujtaba
Intelligence across cultures – Etienne Benson
Meritocracy myth – Gil Richard Musolf
Redefining Intelligence: The Complexities and Cultural Aspects of Intelligence – Lexxie Padron
Socio-Economic Status and Inequalities in Children’s IQ and Economic Preferences – Thomas Deckers et al.
Socioeconomic Disparities in Language Input are Associated with Children’s Language-Related Brain Structure and Reading Skills – Emily C. Merz et al.
Socioeconomic status and the growth of intelligence from infancy through adolescence – Sophie von Stumm & Robert Plomin
The Effects Of Socioeconomic Of Socioeconomic Status And Language Difference On Specific Cognitive Test Performance: A Comparative Study Of African American Children – Fernanda Carvalho
The Eugenic Origins of IQ Testing: Implications for Post-Atkins Litigation – Ajitha Reddy
The Looking Glass for Intelligence Quotient Tests: The Interplay of Motivation, Cognitive Functioning, and Affect – Venkat Ram Reddy Ganuthula & Shuchi Sinha
The Wiring of Intelligence – Alexander O. Savi et al.
Toppling the myth of meritocracy – Michael J. Sandel
Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart – Shane Frederick
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