My son is 6, and I see much of his future education as totally wasteful. The main themes he will learn is that Civil Rights and Diversity are the most important things to know. I beg to differ, even if I agree that diversity in thought is a good thing and civil rights are a good thing. I'm going to tell my kid a trick to getting good grades: write about Martin Luther King/Harriet Tubman/Halle Berry--teachers will be much more reluctant to criticize you than if you use Andrew Carnegie or John Wayne. As a phd, I can see my kid learning what he needs to know online without any credentials, because I am confident that I know what is useful to know. Additionally, if you have some money, so your child isn't desperate for a job out of school, the need for education as a signal decreases and he can be much more efficient in allocating time to learning as opposed to posturing, regardless of his IQ.

Bryan Caplan at EconLib notes that IQ takes a short shrift in econ, and that much of education is signalling. I would say that's an understatement. If IQ, and its genetic influence on future generations, was a chemical like mercury, you would have a Nobel Prize on the discoverer, and every social policy would anticipate its effects. But IQ is genetic, and it's really unfair because--gasp--stupid parents increase the chances are the kid will be stupid too, ceteris paribus. I agree that it would be nicer if life gave every baby a clean break, no overhang because of their parents, but if that were so, then sexual selection may have never generated any preference towards IQ because women who liked smart men would have just as smart babies as women who liked dumb men. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, it's not clear that genetic egalitarianism (ie, that the genetic contribution to intelligence is unrelated to parent's intelligence), is consistent with the evolution of an intelligent species like homo sapiens.

So while I agree that life not being fair is a bummer, I also think that if life were fair in the sense of every child having the same innate 'ability', we probably wouldn't be communicating over the internet.

IQ is relevant for four reasons: it is stable over a lifetime, important (it 'explains' income, crime, etc.), heritable (40-80%), and varies systematically by groups (income or race). Economists try to avoid one of these facts, and thus imply that we are all fundamentally the same, so any differences in results must be the effect of current or prior discrimination. But facts are stubborn, so the question is, how badly do you want to be popular?