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This is from a book written five years ago, but I think some of the material is as relevant today as ever. Here they are, in a nutshell:
1. (Student) Ability varies.
2. Half of the children are below average.
3. Too many people are going to college.
4. America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.
I haven't read the book and I think it's important that we're careful about how we apply these "truths," but it seems like these are things that are worth having a conversation/debate about instead of simply accepting the current narrative and expectations that are in many ways unrealistic.
I actually think number 2 could be flat out wrong. In order for that to be true, "children" would have to not be normally distributed with a long high tail (if children were normally distributed, then you would have a median and mode at mean, and less than half of children would be below average). In other words, we would have to have a large amount of exceptionally high performers compared to the number of exceptionally low performers. I think the opposite is true, we have more children who perform exceptionally badly than perform exceptionally well. The former takes purposeful lack of effort while the latter takes purposeful effort. That would mean that more than half of children are actually above average.
I've never thought much of Murray snce The Bell Curve, which I consider out and out racist, and which subsequent authors have found to be full of holes. I can't udnerstand why anyone takes him seriously after that book. But even with these four points only the first two are correct -- though figuring out who lies where on the spectrum of intelligence can be a lot more difficult than just using an IQ test, as he does in his research.
But the last two are just flat out silly --dangerous even. Everyone does not need college, for sure, but saying we have "too many" college students easily can mean IMO that many students dont have the MONEY to finish, rather than that too many are there. I think you can also make the argument that a well-educated citizenry is an overall benefit and we'd b e better off with more rahter than fewer kids in college, even if it's noit every kid. And while we should defintely take care of the gifted students, no argument there, that goes back to point number one, which is identifying them. There are many types of gifts needed by the nation and many kids who for various reasons have their gifts ignired by the educational system. Further, if we beleive that the future of the nation lies mainly with the high IQ crowd we're doomed. "Smart" people have gotten us into wars, screwed up our economy, and made our legal system incomprehensible. Figuring out the future of America will take a whole lot more than letting high IQ people do what they will.
Too many are in college because there are so many that attending and graduating now reaps for all attendees the same benefit as a high school diploma did 30 years ago - and most students have to go into debt to go instead of the free high school diploma. How about we aim for a well educated citizenry as a result as attending a public high school?
I agree with the first three but have a problem with the last. Our nation depends on how we educate the dumbest. We still depend on those at the bottom of the barrel to do some tasks. Some are important, a matter of life and death. They ought to have basic reading and math skills. Do you want your cab driver unable to read street signs and figure change? I think not.
I actually think number 2 could be flat out wrong. In order for that to be true, "children" would have to not be normally distributed with a long high tail (if children were normally distributed, then you would have a median and mode at mean, and less than half of children would be below average). In other words, we would have to have a large amount of exceptionally high performers compared to the number of exceptionally low performers. I think the opposite is true, we have more children who perform exceptionally badly than perform exceptionally well. The former takes purposeful lack of effort while the latter takes purposeful effort. That would mean that more than half of children are actually above average.
IME this fits with what parents think. I'd say about 75% of parents think their child is gifted....
I do actually agree on your analysis here. I see this in grades where I teach. Easily, 70% of my students are above average grade wise because the ones who fail fail miserably and really drag down the average. I don't reveal the average on an assignment or test unless it is very good because parents will balk if the average is low even though it's only low because just a few kids did very poorly. They don't understand that a couple of scores well below 50% really skews the average. The median is a much more important number than the average.
This is from a book written five years ago, but I think some of the material is as relevant today as ever. Here they are, in a nutshell:
1. (Student) Ability varies.
2. Half of the children are below average.
3. Too many people are going to college.
4. America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.
I haven't read the book and I think it's important that we're careful about how we apply these "truths," but it seems like these are things that are worth having a conversation/debate about instead of simply accepting the current narrative and expectations that are in many ways unrealistic.
I would say our future depends less on how we educate the "academically gifted" than it does on how we educate those in the bottom part of the class. Talents have a way of coming out on their own. Its the kids without much talent that are going to need all the help we can give them to succeed in a world that has become frightfully specialized and competitive in ways I could not have begun to imagine as a child in the 1960s.
I've never thought much of Murray snce The Bell Curve, which I consider out and out racist, and which subsequent authors have found to be full of holes. I can't udnerstand why anyone takes him seriously after that book.
Why was race evidently the first thing that came to mind when low achievement and low ability were mentioned?
First author of The Bell Curve was Richard Hernstein (now deceased), who held an endowed chair in psychology at Harvard, and taught at Harvard since 1958. He painstakingly documents every point mentioned in The Bell Curve. So you disagree with him? Perhaps in a few years you will have an endowed chair at Harvard, and we will be talking about your book instead of his.
More importantly, however, is the hateful venom directed toward Hernstein and Murray (second author of Bell Curve), for example incompetent critics calling them "racist" because, in reality, these critics simply don't like the authors' conclusions, which are well documented through the literature and readily observed in real life. As a result, Murray's subsequent book, Coming Apart, is limited strictly to discussing only Whites. In effect, the topic of racial differences in intelligence has been put completely off limits by controlled-speech political extremists and their followers-on in the Academy and the media, and nobody will now touch the topic with a barge pole.
I would say our future depends less on how we educate the "academically gifted" than it does on how we educate those in the bottom part of the class. Talents have a way of coming out on their own. Its the kids without much talent that are going to need all the help we can give them to succeed in a world that has become frightfully specialized and competitive in ways I could not have begun to imagine as a child in the 1960s.
Talents may come out on their own, but they only soar if they are harnessed and prefected. It is from our best and brightest that all our innovations come. This is not to say that we shouldn't educate our bottom, work to get the most out of them, make sure they get as many of the basic skills as possible, or meet their needs, just that we can't continue to ignore the top. We especially need to stop teaching to the bottom. At minimum, we at least need to go back to teaching to the middle.
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