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established to
create and implement programs that aid in the development of severely
gifted individuals and their ideas. Freedom of intellectual
inquiry and expression is one of the clearest benefits, and most urgent
necessities, of modern democratic society. One requirement of
intellectual freedom is that no institution or group of institutions be
permitted to exercise too great a measure of control over intellectual
commerce (in the traditional, non-entrepreneurial sense). This is
because by their nature, institutions tend to enforce standards of
ideological orthodoxy and intellectual conformity without being able to
guarantee or establish with certainty that their ideas are correct or
their standards justified. The American higher education
system currently possesses a virtual monopoly on intellectual commerce,
particularly with respect to the public and private funding of research.
That is, university degrees and affiliations are typically required for
the issuance of research grants and in filling positions of intellectual
influence. Because the university system is actively standardized by way
of accreditation, this requirement amounts to a restrictive, and
therefore unhealthy, standardization of intellectual commerce, and an
unavoidable obstacle to intellectual and artistic freedom. Academic standardization of
intellectual commerce extends to the system of technical and scientific
journals which publish new results in the sciences and humanities. To an
extent depending on their degree of "respectability", these
journals routinely reject new ideas that run against the grain of
professional consensus, especially where they represent radical
departures within their fields of inquiry, are interdisciplinary
(involve more or less than one established field of inquiry), carry
unwanted philosophical baggage, are presented in an unorthodox way, or
are perceived to come from academically uncredentialed or unaffiliated
authors. Unfortunately, professional
consensus can be (and often is) wrong, especially in the theoretical
phase of scientific inquiry. The fact that academia is a cornerstone of
modern civilization is thus no justification for awarding it, or its
degree-holders or affiliates, a stranglehold on the intellectual life of
humankind. Humanity has the inalienable right to manifest its
intellectual destiny in the mind of any human being capable of
generating and developing new and beneficial ideas, irrespective of all
other factors, and no such person should be denied a voice on grounds of
inadequate credentials. There are those who maintain
that because academic credentials are equally available to everyone,
everyone has an equal chance to participate in intellectual commerce.
But of course, this is in no way true. The mill of academic
credentialization is in many cases prohibitively expensive to enter,
requiring that those of limited means incur mountains of personal debt
while students from privileged social, economic and cultural backgrounds
enjoy immense advantages. Propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding,
financial aid is not equally available to everyone and not every kind
of student is made to feel equally at home by Big Education. This asymmetry tends to work
most strongly, and with the greatest potential for loss, against
underprivileged but highly intelligent, original and individualistic
students, whose own self-insight may give them a far better idea of how
and what they should learn than the curricular platitudes of any
disinterested instructor or faculty committee charged with the aggregate
processing of large numbers of students. Higher education is, after all,
a business, and its corporate entities are inevitably more interested in
quantity of education, which is lucrative and bureaucratically feasible,
than quality of education for a few extraordinarily gifted individuals
who may need more than the usual amount of individualized attention and
understanding. It might be objected that the
general welfare has nothing to do with a small gifted minority, and that
everyone should be helped on an equal basis without discrimination based
on intellectual ability or originality. However, this is clearly an
oversimplification. First, with but few exceptions, the highly-gifted
population deviates from various social and psychological norms and is
often victimized by discrimination as a result, and this constitutes a
social injustice in need of remedy. Secondly, as any educator is well
aware, educational efficiency requires the differential assessment of
intellectual ability and development, which in turn requires scales of
measurement on which people are differently situated. Accordingly,
academia is often considered a worthy recipient of aid and assistance
despite its reliance on differential (and therefore
"discriminative") assessments of cognitive ability. But most importantly, because
the highly gifted population has been responsible for a disproportionate
share of our intellectual progress and thus constitutes a critical human
resource, anything that saves any part of it from dropping through the
sieve-like bureaucratic machinery of the formal education system is of
potential benefit to society and should be strongly encouraged. To deny
this is to insupportably assert that the intellectual monopoly enjoyed
by academia should be maintained at all costs, and that even if academia
is not infallible (and it most certainly is not), it should be permitted
to routinely and casually squander perhaps the most valuable resource
available to mankind. Some maintain that the
Internet, with its vast potential to enhance freedom of expression, has
ended academia's monopoly on the intellectual destiny of humankind. But
while it is true that the Internet opens up new vistas of
self-expression to authors and thinkers, the noise factor is tremendous.
This creates a problem: along with the noise, much of the most valuable
content is inevitably filtered out by those best able to understand it.
In consequence, intellectual influence remains concentrated in the hands
of a closed loop of highly credentialed elites who, on the whole, could
not care less about talented people excluded from the system due to
educational or bureaucratic inefficiency. The Mega Foundation aims to
provide an alternative to academia, and thus to provide an open,
unrigged intellectual marketplace better suited to the free-form, often
dialectically-motivated exploratory and expressive styles of
intellectually and creatively gifted individuals. By focusing on the
gifted, it attempts to reclaim an invaluable human resource that
continues to slip through gaping cracks in the system, countering the
“noise factor” with a new standard of credentialization designed to
match the individual's capacity for meaningful intellectual production
rather than the bureaucratic convenience of a disinterested, largely
self-absorbed academic elite. In addition to promoting
intellectual freedom and reclaiming lost intellectual resources, the
Mega Foundation investigates the nature of giftedness with an eye to
bettering the plight of the gifted and optimizing the human intellect on
the individual and aggregate levels. It advocates socially-beneficial
improvements in the quality of education available in primary,
secondary, and university-level educational settings, especially with
regard to science and ethics. And for those ready for a more advanced
approach to bettering the human condition, it provides a solid
conceptual framework with the potential to help unify a nation and a
world still torn by disagreement and strife. Here is a somewhat more specific (but still incomplete) account of Mega Foundation goals and projects. Promoting
Intellectual Freedom The Mega Foundation, through
its journals, e-press, and on-line forums, provides an alternative venue
for members of the intellectually gifted community, thus providing a new
and potentially fruitful marketplace for the free and constructive
exchange of ideas. De-Isolating
and Encouraging Productivity among the Gifted Through its extensive web
presence, including a network of journals and on-line forums, the Mega
Foundation promotes communication and mutual support among members of
the gifted community. Mega Foundation forums and journals provide a
nonstandard learning environment amenable to the unconventional,
dialectical and often idiosyncratic learning styles of intellectually
and creatively gifted individuals. Tianadara Retreat We are pleased to announce the pending acquisition of a beautiful rural property in the Green Hills of Missouri. Located 12 miles from the new Mega Foundation Headquarters, Tianadara Ranch is a idyllic pastoral retreat situated on 140 acres of mixed woodlands and meadows. Tianadara serves as a meeting place and retreat for friends of the Foundation, a center of gravity for the gifted and talented community, and a natural setting in which visitors can enjoy a regenerative blend of conversation, meditation and recreation conducing to intellectual, artistic and spiritual growth. The
Mega Foundation Press As a service to the gifted
community and the general public, the Mega Foundation runs a small
electronic publishing house, the Mega Foundation Press, specializing in
works of intellectual interest, including original works by members of
the gifted community. Recognizing a Neglected Resource: Enfranchising the Gifted The Mega Foundation offers a viable alternative to academic credentials with respect to free intellectual commerce, implementing standards of qualification designed to match the individual's capacity for meaningful intellectual production rather than bureaucratic conformity and conceptual regurgitation. Optimizing
the Intellectual Resources of Mankind By means of focused web-based conferencing, the Mega Foundation endeavors to direct the attention of the highly intelligent to urgent social problems customarily neglected by the intellectual mainstream, promoting a think-tank atmosphere wherever possible. While academia uses the highly gifted as “grant engines” and puts them to work on any research project that will feed the institutional coffers, the Mega Foundation emphasizes the need for mankind to focus its intellectual resources on furthering the unity and elevating the consciousness of humanity rather than on chasing tenure, spinning publish-or-perish treadwheels, or cultivating technological cash cows for personal, corporate or institutional profit and advancement. By way of guidance, it provides access to a conceptual framework supporting a unified, intelligence-based approach to science, philosophy and social welfare. Maintaining
a Science News Resource Thanks to the efforts of Mega
Foundation Director Dr. Robert N. Seitz, the Mega Foundation sponsors HIQ
News, one of the Internet’s most comprehensive clearinghouses of
late-breaking news in science and technology. Research
and Study of Giftedness In keeping with its desire to
optimize the intellectual resources of humanity, the Mega Foundation
serves as a platform for research and study on topics relating to giftedness and the human intellect
in general. On a
related front, the Mega Foundation has published an informative dialogue
with the renowned psychometrician Arthur Jensen, a preeminent authority
on genius and human intelligence. Other dialogues with thinkers who
display intellectual giftedness, whose work relates in some way to
giftedness or psychometrics, or whose work in some way exemplifies the
spirit of originality or ideological iconoclasm provide much-needed
insight on the ideas, concerns and intellectual styles of gifted
individuals. Education in Science, Philosophy and Ethics Recognizing the
responsibility of gifted adults to provide the younger generation with
guidance calculated promote the general welfare, the Mega Foundation has
started to lay the groundwork for an ambitious project with the purpose
of advocating and enhancing methodological excellence and philosophical
balance in school science curricula. This project aims to provide
resources and advice across the educational spectrum wherever it is
needed. Pending an appropriate grant, the Mega Foundation will be
developing a K-12 ethics and critical thinking curriculum, Logic
for Living, suitable for application in classroom settings. Logic
for Living is based on logic and decision theory and is to be
implemented within a program of overall character development. Its
rational foundations will be set forth in special
course materials to be developed by the Foundation and
field-tested through educational
pilot programs. Promoting
Philosophical Unity and Coherent Intellectual Progress The Mega Foundation offers
access to something that mankind desperately needs but still lacks: a
unified philosophical perspective of sufficient depth and scope to serve
as a common basis for social unity and scientific progress. While this
framework is the creation of one of its members rather than the
Foundation as a whole, it has been made available through informative
web pages, journal articles and specialized Internet forums in order to
provide fertile ground for discussion and exemplify the kind of
potentially beneficial intellectual production befitting the
intellectually gifted. Thanks to the unpaid full-time effort of its Directors and supporters, the Mega Foundation, which was incorporated in 2000 as a nonprofit charitable-purpose foundation, does all of this on a modest budget. Many thanks to the loyal friends and supporters who continue to help us in achieving these worthwhile goals. To read more about the events that led to the creation of the Mega Foundation, visit the History page. |
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