In the News- Intelligence and Education
Lee Emmerich Jamison
Re: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009531
Today's Wall Street Journal editorial page contains an article by Charles Murray (part one of a three-part series to be concluded on Thursday) which should be of note to everyone interested in education and opportunity, not merely in America, but in the whole world. Murray will be remembered as one of the authors of "The Bell Curve" which, thirteen years ago, ignited a firestorm of debate over the subject of Intelligence and the educability of the masses. Today's article takes up the gauntlet once more with arguments that, on the face of them seem both well reasoned and scientifically supported.
Such is the danger of misapplied science.
Murray's position is that education is doing a much better job than it is represented as doing in media representations, citing, for example the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) report. The report stated that 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" scores. While this looks like a poor result Murray argues that it is statistically in line with distributions of intelligence and that, indeed, this may represent the statistically rational expectation for the educational system.
The trouble with g
Murray and others have made much of what is called "g", a conception of the intellectual capacity of a given human being. We only have so much, it is said, and no matter how we seek to intervene one can't change that founding capacity for intellectual achievement.
While Murray seeks to diffuse the impact of the so-called "Flynn Effect", the rise in general recorded intelligence in advanced countries, in his article it is still there. Civilization's effect on the human being is to raise the animal's intelligence.
Are there differences in the intellectual endowment of individual human beings? No doubt there are. Murray's arguments , though, seem to inveigh against interventions by society designed to mitigate the inequities that are both the social and economic product of perceived intellectual contrasts. The logical result of full acceptance of his ideas would seem to be a system that consigns people of perceived low intelligence to a kind of class separation. Inevitably such a notion will devolve into a system of castes with all the imbedded injustice inherent in such systems throughout the history and prehistory of Mankind. It is hard enough to maintain a just society when the law assumes all people are equal in the face of the reality that they are not. When the law abandons an essentially moral stance in this regard society's support for those who would hope to rise by personal effort above the constraints of their nature evaporates. By law perception becomes reality.
The real challenge
Murray's research and writings are an important contribution to the debate over intelligence and education. The science, though, is so desperately incomplete and so fraught with poor controls that it would be foolish in the extreme for us to pour policy in concrete over what is available today. Today's article makes much of education from kindergarten on, but is mute on the issue of culture's contribution to those first five years. The article notes that the Flynn Effect has leveled off in Western societies, but has nothing to say about whether this is a result of a greater prevalence of the consignment of pre-kindergarteners to daycare among those cultures. Could this simply be an effect of children being raised by less well educated women? How much of the difference in measured intelligence among ethnic groups has nothing to do with innate ability and is simply the product of contrasts in early child-rearing culture?
Murray gives, probably because he has, no guidance.
We will follow this series with some interest.
see also- http://www.sciam.com/ go to the bottom of the home page and look in the "News Scan" for "Unsettled Scores"
And also "Parallel Cultures" in this blog.
