“Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

I recently read these three ¹²³ WSJ articles by Charles Murray on education in America. The name “Charles Murray” ring a bell? Maybe because he’s the much-villified author of “The Bell Curve”—a book that noted, among many other things, that there is a very real and measurable difference in “g” between population samples based on easily-noted factors such as sex or race. Oh! The horrors! That the facts and honest science bear out Murray’s conclusions is anathema to politically correct closet racists and anti-reality bigots, hence the plethora of books by people who have often neither read ”The Bell Curve” nor understood its scientific underpinnings (nor cared to).

In the articles linked above, Murray points out three critical ways education in America is failing its citizens and by implication, weakening our society.

In “Intelligence in the Classroom,” Murray’s thesis is clear:
“Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.”

Here, although he doesn’t explicitly make the connection, Murray demolishes the “compassionate conservative” big-government “No Child Gets Ahead” (disingenuously called ‘No Child Left Behind”) mindset where excessive amounts of resources are misapplied to attempt to make children who are intellectually unsuited to the attempt “above average” in accomplishment… ensuring that teachers, students and parents will all know the reality of failure, regardless of failure’s Newspeak relabling as “success”. Mediocrity (and less) relabeled as “excellence,” setting the stage for Harrison Bergeron.

Today’s simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon…

…Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough…

Let’s stop pretending that every child can be above average in intellectual accomplishment. All that does is force schools to lower the averages… or cheat.

In the second essay, Murray asks “What’s Wrong With Vocational School?” Indeed. I’m reminded of the quote at the head of my own blog,

“An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”—John Gardner

Murray’s opening paragraphs point out a stunningly obvious truth, one that is anathema to the tailors of the emeperor’s new clothes busily  toiling away in schools of education, government bureaucracies and school administration:

The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today’s simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.

Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.

These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.

“What?!? My kid not suited to a college education?!?!?” echoes across the land. Well, no. Not if they simply do not have the intellectual horsepower to handle intellectual pursuits.

Read the article.

In the last of the three articles, “Aztecs vs. Greeks,” I believe Murray touches briefly on the most significant education issue facing us: how we are mis-educating our brightest. His thesis? “Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise.”

Can anyone doubt that Al Gore and Jean Fraud Kerry do indeed have above average (in fact, perhaps well above average) intelligence? And can any rational person escape the fact that they are each too stupid to pound sand in a rathole? What they lack, far more than intelligence, is the ability to use what native intelligence they have wisely. And so it is for Dan Blather and his ilk among Mass Media Podpeople who regularly spout the most egregious lies as though they had recieved them as wisdom written on stone tablets by the hand of God Himself.

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom…

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.

Long gone are the days when the logic of grammar was considered important in the teaching of English. Heck, the teaching of English at any level languishes (as I am reminded every time I recall a head of an English department at a major East Coast school who once asked me if my quotation of a famous soliloquy from The Scottish Play was from Faulkner!), let alone the idea of responsible use of one’s gifts. Noblesse oblige is so elitist, don’tcha know…

And so we are steering headlong into the rocks upon which our society must break, as long as our acceptance of “shoddiness in philosophy” is parallelled by our scorn of “excellence in plumbing” is evident in how our young are raised and taught.

The electoral wisdom of the collective common man so necessary to the survival of a democratic republic cannot flourish in a society that has an education system such as ours now is.

Said mnmus @ 12:18 pm | Permalink   

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