Considering what’s being watched on television, it’s obvious that most people are below average.
The follow-up in the series–the article about college–was interesting and at least partly right.
What about this made you pukey?
The newspaper of inherited wealth wants to give up on most kids. How pleasant. In the mind of the WSJ it is never a system failure – failure always means that Calvinist “born damned” concept. Puke? No, makes me want to hit.
See, there’s a lot about this article that someone who home or un-schools could agree with.
I do think it’s incredibly unrealistic to expect a sausage factory approach to learning to work for everyone. The public schools have always worked best for a certain kind of student and it’s pretty dumb to expect them to produce sameness in kids of wildly differing abilities. Why continue to spend money on programs which have not and cannot work–that was the question, I believe? And it certainly was not answered in this first article–in any sense and especially not in a Calvinist sense.
It is true that some people are born one way, and some another. It’s what one does with that information that counts. For whatever reason, we as a culture value a specific kind of intelligence over the others (to our grave detriment), and that valuing cause all sorts of problems; from aborting babies with Down’s Syndrome, to shoehorning all children into the same kind of school, to expecting that everyone should strive for a four-year college degree, it’s all of a part. We value “book smart” over everything else, it seems, and when making educational policy, we throw a lot of money at kids who may never be “book smart”, and make them miserable in the process.
To add to this (and I’m sorry to hog the comment box), my two girls are not the same upstairs. I have one, Ada, who struggles to master basic reading skills. I suppose that should I have her IQ tested (which I wouldn’t), she’d score lower than her younger sister Julia, who was self-taught and reading at three.
I had a friend (a friend no longer) who confided once that she’d choose Julia over Ada because kids like Ada (pretty, sweet and average) were a “dime a dozen” while kids like Julia were so awesome to keep challenged. The same woman, when her son was diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, said that at least it meant he was “smarter than the other kids”.
As for me, I love my girls and am certain that my job isn’t to make them what they are not. Ada gets a great deal of extra homework help at our kitchen table at night so that she can do her best. Her best will never be close to Julia’s best, but as long as they both *do their best*, and are kind, respectful of others, and industrious, I think that that’s plenty. An educational policy that could take the difference between them into account would serve them both better than the current lock-step “everyone is the same” model.
Smarticus, the thing is: Attitudes like those expressed by the WSJ are the problem you lament. They’re saying that *because* kids are different, we should *jettison* them. Not that we should change curriculum, but that we should simply *abandon* them. They’re blaming the schools for not doing enough, and using that as an excuse for not enabling them to do enough.
See how puke-inducing that is? It’s the same old eugenics bullshit disguised as another bell curve argument. It cuts a line across society saying that those below the line are unworthy.
It’s a fancy-pants argument to say that we’ll just have to ignore the needs of some children if we’re to move forward.
I re-read it literally four times just now and I didn’t see an argument for jettisoning anybody. Where does he say that?
“While concepts such as “emotional intelligence” and “multiple intelligences” have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
“That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.”
What policies do you think he’s talking about?
I found it an interesting piece. I understand the arguement that some kids may not have what it takes to meet some level that the government has decided is the “standard acheivement” no matter what kind of education they recieve. Despite that, I think we owe it to all students to give them the best education possible. Will that low IQ student go on to become the astrophysicist after getting a steller education? Probably not. But at least that student will have a solid foundation to go out and become a productive and happy person who has learned the information taught to the best of their abilities.
Comments (9)
Considering what’s being watched on television, it’s obvious that most people are below average.
The follow-up in the series–the article about college–was interesting and at least partly right.
What about this made you pukey?
The newspaper of inherited wealth wants to give up on most kids. How pleasant. In the mind of the WSJ it is never a system failure – failure always means that Calvinist “born damned” concept. Puke? No, makes me want to hit.
See, there’s a lot about this article that someone who home or un-schools could agree with.
I do think it’s incredibly unrealistic to expect a sausage factory approach to learning to work for everyone. The public schools have always worked best for a certain kind of student and it’s pretty dumb to expect them to produce sameness in kids of wildly differing abilities. Why continue to spend money on programs which have not and cannot work–that was the question, I believe? And it certainly was not answered in this first article–in any sense and especially not in a Calvinist sense.
It is true that some people are born one way, and some another. It’s what one does with that information that counts. For whatever reason, we as a culture value a specific kind of intelligence over the others (to our grave detriment), and that valuing cause all sorts of problems; from aborting babies with Down’s Syndrome, to shoehorning all children into the same kind of school, to expecting that everyone should strive for a four-year college degree, it’s all of a part. We value “book smart” over everything else, it seems, and when making educational policy, we throw a lot of money at kids who may never be “book smart”, and make them miserable in the process.
To add to this (and I’m sorry to hog the comment box), my two girls are not the same upstairs. I have one, Ada, who struggles to master basic reading skills. I suppose that should I have her IQ tested (which I wouldn’t), she’d score lower than her younger sister Julia, who was self-taught and reading at three.
I had a friend (a friend no longer) who confided once that she’d choose Julia over Ada because kids like Ada (pretty, sweet and average) were a “dime a dozen” while kids like Julia were so awesome to keep challenged. The same woman, when her son was diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, said that at least it meant he was “smarter than the other kids”.
As for me, I love my girls and am certain that my job isn’t to make them what they are not. Ada gets a great deal of extra homework help at our kitchen table at night so that she can do her best. Her best will never be close to Julia’s best, but as long as they both *do their best*, and are kind, respectful of others, and industrious, I think that that’s plenty. An educational policy that could take the difference between them into account would serve them both better than the current lock-step “everyone is the same” model.
Smarticus, the thing is: Attitudes like those expressed by the WSJ are the problem you lament. They’re saying that *because* kids are different, we should *jettison* them. Not that we should change curriculum, but that we should simply *abandon* them. They’re blaming the schools for not doing enough, and using that as an excuse for not enabling them to do enough.
See how puke-inducing that is? It’s the same old eugenics bullshit disguised as another bell curve argument. It cuts a line across society saying that those below the line are unworthy.
It’s a fancy-pants argument to say that we’ll just have to ignore the needs of some children if we’re to move forward.
I re-read it literally four times just now and I didn’t see an argument for jettisoning anybody. Where does he say that?
“While concepts such as “emotional intelligence” and “multiple intelligences” have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
“That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.”
What policies do you think he’s talking about?
I found it an interesting piece. I understand the arguement that some kids may not have what it takes to meet some level that the government has decided is the “standard acheivement” no matter what kind of education they recieve. Despite that, I think we owe it to all students to give them the best education possible. Will that low IQ student go on to become the astrophysicist after getting a steller education? Probably not. But at least that student will have a solid foundation to go out and become a productive and happy person who has learned the information taught to the best of their abilities.
Comments are closed.