In the News- Murray on Intelligence and Responsibility
Lee Emmerich Jamison
Re: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009541
In prior comments on Charles Murray's series of articles about education and intelligence on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal one could easily have assumed I simply have it in for Murray and everything he has to say. Not so. Today's article (the last in a series of three) is a case in point.
Murray states that the very intelligent should be held up as having particular responsibility in the world, noting that people with I.Q.s in excess of 120 dominate the processes that shape our culture. This group represents the top ten percent of the distribution of intelligence in the population. Furthermore he holds that this group, because they CAN learn more, should have more challenging educations. They should, at least sometimes, be set apart, gifted schooled with gifted. They should be required, Murray says, to take coursework in which they are pushed beyond their capacities, and, thus, forced to see as few of them do, the limits of their gifts.
The word "gifts", in today's article is not, in Murray's opinion, to be taken lightly. In the environment in which children are raised today political correctness makes us shy away from seeing the differences in our native endowments. In the absense of such awareness, Murray asserts, many grow up to believe they do better because they ARE better. In the service of a pretense at equity we precipitate a more insidious arrogance.
As far as Murray goes in today's comments, and I do encourage you to read all three articles, I have only minor quibbles not worth mentioning here. But two things are loud by their absence.
First, in yesterday's comments I noted our experience with my son, my family's experience with me (and didn't mention similar experiences with younger brothers), and my mother e-mailed me to add my father's experience. Out of our five experiences in only one did early testing or early academic experince detect high intelligence. In my instance the two kinds of detection were highly equivocal. One of my brothers, currently working on his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry, was identified in early childhood as "retarded". All of us are at, or above, I.Q.s of 130. Murray's statements about the education of the intelligent are admirable, but only so long as the detection of intelligence is nearly flawless. Familial experience tells me beyond the shadow of a doubt such is nowhere near the case.
Second, intelligence is clearly not simply an attribute of the machinery. Blacks born in Africa are not intrinsically smarter than blacks born in America. Nor are blacks born in the Carribean. Their rate of economic success in America is almost indistiguishable from that of native-born whites, though. Furthermore, knowing who one's great-grandparents were does not necessarily bestow on one an extra measure of intelligence, but there is a stronger correlation between this one factor and economic success in America than there is with any purely racial or ethnic characteristic. Do I know the statue in the Litchfield State Park in New York to Mary Jemison honors my great aunt nine generations removed because I am smart, or does something about the family's preservation of that knowledge contribute to my being smart?
There is a cultural element to intelligence that affects children early, probably before they ever see a kindergarten classroom. Murray never even hints at a concern that identifying I.Q. on its own as the key to societal improvement may represent barking up the wrong cultural tree.
The intelligent have a responsibility in our society. That is true. They should be well, and challengingly educated. That, too, is true. But it is wrong to make a hierarchy of the easily identifiably intelligent at the possible expense of either swelling the ranks of the intelligent by finding ways to intervene in the very early lives of children to make the most of what all of us are given, or seeking ways to identify those who fall between the considerable cracks in our capacity to recognize their gifts.
Culture is the software we share for running these marvelous machines we are. Culture's common goal should be making all of them run better.
