72. Pepper Stetler | One Mother’s Reckoning with the IQ Test

My guest today is Pepper Stetler. Pepper is the author of A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning with the IQ Test, which we discuss in this episode. She is also a professor of art history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She has written extensively on issues facing people with intellectual disabilities and their caregivers, in publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate. She lives in Oxford, Ohio.

Some of the topics we explore in this episode include:

• What inspired Pepper to write this book

• What Pepper learned through having a daughter with Down’s Syndrome

• Unhelpful assumptions about learning and intelligence

• The history of IQ testing

• The relative recency of the concept “normal”

• Pepper’s vision for change