http://reason.com/archives/1995/03/01/cracked-bell
Cracked Bell
James J. Heckman from the March 1995 issue
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, New York: The Free Press, 845 pages, $30.00
Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein have produced a controversial and well-written book about human differences, the sources of human differences, and how we should respond to those differences. The early reactions to the book in the popular press have been emotional and denunciatory, focusing almost exclusively on the authors' discussion of racial differences and the genetic basis for those differences. This is unfortunate. The book is not devoted exclusively to a discussion of racial differences, although it certainly considers them in detail. It is obvious that most reviewers of the book have not read it as a whole, if they have read it at all. It is also clear that in an age of rampant egalitarianism, discussion of differences in cognitive skills remains taboo. The authors deserve much praise for discussing a forbidden subject and thereby initiating a public discussion that challenges the egalitarian presumptions of our day.
Like Robert Reich in The Work of Nations and Mickey Kaus in The End of Equality, the authors are concerned about the growth of economic and social inequality in American society, a topic that dominates many contemporary political discussions. Unlike those authors, Murray and Herrnstein probe more deeply into the personal sources of inequality, devoting considerable attention to the genetic component of personal differences and presenting fresh empirical evidence about an important relationship between their measure of IQ and success in society at large. Like Reich and Kaus, Murray and Herrnstein worry about the consequences for the social order of the growing inequality in economic and social success between the "haves" and the "have nots," and the social and economic partitioning of high-skill, high-IQ persons away from low-skill, low-IQ persons.
This 845-page book covers an enormous and impressive range of topics. Its numerous tables and charts make close reading a challenge. Indeed, all but trained social scientists will be intimidated by the statistical details and by the complicated arguments used by the authors. Even more forbidding to most readers will be the hundreds of pages of footnotes and appendix tables that document the statistical analysis underlying the arguments in the text. Despite all this, the book is organized in easily summarized sections. It is accessible at one level to all readers who are willing to skip the details.
The book contains four parts. Part I updates Herrnstein's 1973 book IQ and the Meritocracy and documents that American society has become more stratified on the basis of intelligence than it was even one generation ago. Merit--treated here as synonymous with IQ--has become concentrated in schools and the workplace. This increase in cognitive stratification results from the realization of the meritocratic vision of access to institutions based on individual ability. Social class and parental income play weaker roles in regulating access to education and jobs than at any time in American history.
The authors go on to note a phenomenon not discussed in Herrnstein's book--that since the late 1970s, the economic returns to measured skills, and in particular education, have increased. This has created a growing gap between the wages and employment of the skilled and the unskilled. The authors note a strong, but by no means perfect, relationship between skill and IQ.
Part II presents original empirical research, combined with a synthesis of the existing empirical literature, that shows a strong relationship between the authors' measure of IQ and social performance. This portion of the book puts empirical flesh on Herrnstein's original bare-bones argument. Low-IQ persons are more likely to be in poverty, drop out of school, be unemployed or altogether idle, be on welfare, be bad parents, commit crimes, and withdraw from political activity than are high-IQ persons. In general, this relationship holds even after adjusting for the authors' measure of socioeconomic background.
The authors wish their readers to draw from this exercise the conclusion that nature--not just parental or social environment--plays an important role in explaining a variety of social pathologies. Taken literally, their research demonstrates that IQ, rather than socioeconomic background, plays the dominant role in generating differences in a variety of socially important outcomes among persons. The analysis uses data only for whites. By proceeding in this way, the authors establish the importance of IQ in accounting for individual differences without getting into the controversial issue of racial bias in IQ tests.
In Part III, they mention the unmentionable by directly analyzing the sources of ethnic differences in social outcomes and the role of their measure of IQ in accounting for these differences. They firmly and rather convincingly refute the critics of IQ and aptitude tests who claim that the tests are racially biased and unrelated to true productivity in schools or the workplace. They discuss the well-documented disparity between the distributions of IQ for blacks and whites, along with other ethnic disparities. Their empirical work substantiates the role of IQ in accounting for a considerable portion of ethnic differences in socioeconomic outcomes and demonstrates the concentration of low-IQ persons (of all races) in a variety of pathological categories. The higher rate of reproduction and immigration among the lower-IQ groups also receives attention, along with the consequences of this phenomenon for the American gene pool. They claim that the average IQ is declining in the United States.
Part IV really consists of two separate sections. The first section builds on the first three parts of the book and discusses the implications of the authors' findings for social policy. Murray and Herrnstein present a pessimistic summary of efforts to raise cognitive ability through social programs. This review of the ineffectiveness of most social programs harkens back to Murray's Losing Ground, except that now the cognitive limitations of individuals rather than perverse incentives created by the programs lead to their failure. The authors discuss the "dumbing down" of American public education and the shift in educational expenditures away from gifted children. Under the aegis of promoting equality, Rawlsian educational policy has taken resources away from the able and given them to the less able.
They also discuss affirmative action in colleges and the workplace. Murray and Herrnstein make the simple, powerful, and apparently very controversial point that disparities in intelligence and abilities among ethnic groups, combined with equality of opportunity at the individual level, will produce demographic disparities in college attendance, job hiring, and promotion rates. Such disparities often lead to interventions by governments enforcing anti-discrimination laws.
Murray and Herrnstein argue convincingly that employment tests banned by the courts as discriminatory at least partly predict productivity and are, if anything, biased in favor of minorities. Further, they make the claim that prohibitions against using the tests impair economic productivity and that "race-normed" adjustments of test scores misclassify workers, create tokenism in the workplace, and often stigmatize the intended recipients of government beneficence. The press has attacked this section of the book, as well as the section on racial differences in IQ, as racist in tone and content. In fact, the authors advocate the nonracist policy of treating persons as individuals rather than as members of racial groups.
The last two chapters of the book abandon the empirical focus. The penultimate chapter presents a bleak vision of an IQ-stratified meritocracy with a cognitive elite increasingly isolated from the rest of society. In this worst-case scenario, the affluent and the cognitive elite merge interests, in part because many members of the cognitive elite have become affluent. Together they form a ruling class. A deteriorating quality of life emerges for the cognitively feeble, who become economically and socially dysfunctional. Unable to cope with the complexity of modern society, they become wards of the state.
In the final chapter, the authors turn to Murray's In Pursuit as an alternative to their bleak vision of a cognitively stratified social order. They harken to a communitarian ideal in which places are found for all persons in cognitively integrated local neighborhoods. Following Murray's previous book, they suggest that removing power from the center and returningit to the community will produce vital neighborhoods that will find a place for everyone and foster dignity and self-respect. Simple rules that everyone can understand, and simple morality and justice that clearly define what is right and wrong, are the essential features of a viable communitarian social order comprising persons with diverse cognitive skills.
A rigorous, well-reasoned challenge to contemporary presumptions about equality, egalitarianism, and the malleability of human beings is long overdue. Had the authors taken more care in presenting their evidence and summarizing that of others, and had they woven their argument more closely, their book would be that challenge. Unfortunately, it is not.
The book fails for four main reasons. First, too much space is devoted to discussions of intrinsically irrelevant issues. Nothing central to the case for recognizing diversity in human abilities hinges on the issue of whether there is one "true ability" or whether there are multiple abilities--as common sense, much psychometric research, and the authors' own evidence indicate is the actual state of affairs. Despite this evidence, Murray and Herrnstein devote many pages to justifying a one-ability, or "g," model of human intelligence. Admitting that persons have multiple skills does not undermine the empirical case that heterogeneity in ability is an important fact of social and economic life. Indeed, acknowledging a multiplicity of skills emphasizes human diversity.
The long discussions of heredity also distract attention away from the main thrust of the argument and generate needless controversy. The authors acknowledge, as does most serious science on the matter, the difficulty of identifying separate genetic and environmental contributions to intelligence. Most scholars assign some weight to both sources, but the allocation of precise weights generates much well-deserved controversy. The authors fail to justify why it is useful to establish any particular set of weights or even a range of weights, except the special weight that assigns all credit to the genes.
This observation points to the second, more fundamental, reason why this book fails to provide an effective challenge to contemporary egalitarian social policy. One might oppose such policies on moral or ethical grounds. Instead, the authors choose an empirical approach. Yet they fail to develop the empirical case in a satisfactory or coherent manner.
Before I read this book, I thought that Murray and Herrnstein would do for policies aimed at reducing inequality what Murray did for poverty policy in Losing Ground, by documenting the failure of many social programs designed to boost the skills of the less able. Chapter 17 of their book discusses the mixed evidence on the success of early childhood interventions designed to boost IQ. By no means does the evidence they discuss rule out the possibility of boosting IQ through programs that enrich the learning environments of young children. Indeed, the authors acknowledge that there are strong indications that very intensive programs can be effective. Half-hearted interventions like Head Start are definitely not effective.
It is striking that the authors do not discuss the costs and benefits of various interventions. It is in these terms that public policy discussions regarding skill-enhancement programs are usually conducted. The authors seek to short-circuit all of the hard work required to make credible cost-benefit calculations by claiming that there is a genetic basis for skill differences.
But estimates of a genetic component of skills are irrelevant to the requisite cost-benefit analysis unless it can be established that all differences are genetic. No one, including the authors, claims that this is so. Only if all differences are genetic--and if no offsets to genetic endowments can be created by families, communities, or governments--would it be possible to use the information on the genetic contribution of skills to make the required cost-benefit analysis. In that extreme case, which no one accepts as empirically relevant, the costs of making change are infinite. Genetics and heritability determine all. Social programs cannot be effective.
Equally obvious is the point that knowing that all skill components are environmentally determined does not justify interventions. Knowing that we can teach calculus to a child with an IQ of 65 but only at an enormous cost would not justify a policy of doing so, except in the minds of zealots committed to extreme egalitarian visions. Discussions of nature versus nurture are irrelevant to practical policy discussions couched in terms of costs and benefits. An evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions is required to justify or oppose social policy designed to cope with inequality. The authors do not provide a systematic evaluation of such programs. The Bell Curve fails to present the hard information required to settle these matters on the factual grounds chosen by the authors.
This point is particularly telling for their assessment of education. The authors offer an inconsistent treatment of education throughout the book. Early on, they highlight the finding of many recent studies--that the economic return to education has increased in the past 15 years or so. The gaps between the wages of college-educated workers and less-educated workers has widened. This phenomenon has contributed to growing income inequality.
They also establish that more-able persons tend to attain higher levels of schooling. They acknowledge--and then go on to forget--that the relationship between education and ability is far from exact. In fact, throughout much of the book, they equate ability and education and implicitly assume that the economic returns to ability drive the economic returns to education.
On the empirical grounds chosen by the authors, this implicit assumption is false. Their own evidence (buried in Appendix 6), as well as a vast literature in empirical social science, clearly indicates that controlling for ability lowers but does not eliminate the return to schooling measured in terms of earnings. The evidence on this point is consistent across many studies. Controlling for their measure of ability, the returns to education sometimes fall by as much as 25 percent, but they never go to zero.
Ability and education are not the same thing, and both have economic rewards. Accounting for ability weakens but hardly eliminates the role of education in raising earnings. On average, an extra year of schooling still increases earnings by at least a substantial 6 percent to 8 percent. So there is room for social policy to eliminate earnings differentials between persons of the same ability level. Neither The Bell Curve nor the literature on schooling provides much evidence on the all-important question of the efficacy of education as a tool for equalizing the earnings of persons of different ability levels.
What little is known indicates that ability--or IQ--is not a fixed trait for the young (persons up to age 8 or so). Herrnstein noted this in IQ and the Meritocracy. Sustained high-intensity investments in the education of young children, including such parental activities as reading and responding to children, stimulate learning and further education. Good environments promote learning for young children at all levels of ability. In this sense, there is fragmentary evidence that enriched education can be a good investment even for children of low initial ability, because it stimulates cumulative learning processes and may raise ability. There is much more negative evidence for adults, where ability is a more stable trait. For low-ability adults, there is little evidence that educational investments are socially profitable.
The authors also disregard much recent empirical evidence by Richard Murnane and others that indicates the increasing returns to the measures used by Murray and Herrnstein account for only a small portion of the recent increase in the economic return to schooling. While payments for ability have increased somewhat in the past 15 years, there remains a substantial increase in the payment for education unrelated to the authors' measure of ability.
It is unfortunate that the authors disregard this important evidence. Operating on the empirical playing field chosen by Murray and Herrnstein, a die-hard interventionist could find much credible evidence to support an active social policy to eliminate skill differentials. Their implicit claim that ability drives the economic return to education, and the recent increase in the economic return to education, fails to pass empirical muster.
The third source of The Bell Curve's failure lies in the details of its analysis of the impact of ability on measured outcomes such as earnings. In their empirical research, the authors examine how well one measure of ability explains a variety of economic and social behaviors. They pit their ability measure against a measure of the socioeconomic status of persons when they were children. The authors intend this contrast to reveal the relative importance of "genes" and "environment" in accounting for behavior. Outcomes are much more sensitive to their measure of ability than to their measure of socioeconomic status. Large changes in the socioeconomic variables have weak effects on the outcome measures, while small changes in ability have large effects on the same outcome measures.
This sort of empirical exercise prospers--or founders--on the details. The credibility of any empirical study depends on the care taken by the analyst in defining and measuring concepts, and in interpreting conclusions drawn from the data. It is at this point that the book becomes a policy polemic rather than a scholarly study of human differences.
First, consider the definitions of the two key variables used in the authors' empirical study: IQ and family background. In their empirical analysis, the operational definition of IQ is the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score, which is based on an aggregation of a subset of 10 separate exams given to more than 12,000 youth in 1980. The youth were 15 to 23 years old when the tests were administered. These tests were designed to predict success in military training schools, and there is much evidence that they do so, although by no means are they 100-percent reliable. Most of these tests appear to be achievement tests rather than ability tests (i.e., they partly measure factual knowledge and not pure ability). A subset of four tests was assembled to define the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score used by Murray and Herrnstein.
Ironically, the authors delete from their composite AFQT score a timed test of numerical operations because it is not highly correlated with the other tests. Yet it is well known that in the data they use, this subtest is the single best predictor of earnings of all the AFQT test components. The fact that many of the subtests are only weakly correlated with each other, and that the best predictor of earnings is only weakly correlated with their "g-loaded" score, only heightens doubts that a single-ability model is a satisfactory description of human intelligence. It also drives home the point that the "g-loading" so strongly emphasized by Murray and Herrnstein measures only agreement among tests--not predictive power for socioeconomic outcomes. By the same token, one could also argue that the authors have biased their empirical analysis against the conclusions they obtain by disregarding the test with the greatest predictive power.
More disturbing is the authors' treatment of family background. The index is based on parental education and occupational status, and on family income measured at one point in the entire life cycle of the child. For many young adults, the family-income measure is entirely missing and is omitted from the construction of the index.
The IQ measure used by Murray and Herrnstein is taken rather late in the life cycle of the child. (Recall that the IQ test is administered to youth 15 to 23 years old.) Many analysts suspect that IQ as measured by tests administered after early childhood reflects the outcome of social and cultural influences. The authors attempt to eliminate these influences by a standard statistical method called regression analysis.
But the standard statistical methods used by Murray and Herrnstein are vulnerable to measurement error. It would be incredible if 15 to 23 years of environmental influences, including the nurturing of parents, the resources they spent on a child, their cultural environment, their interaction with their children, and the influence of the larger community could be summarized by a single measure of education, occupation, and family income in one year. If environment is poorly measured but affects the test score--and there is solid evidence of environmental impacts on test scores--then Murray and Herrnstein's finding that IQ has a stronger impact on socioeconomic outcomes than the measured environment may simply arise from the poor quality of the measure of the environment.
The authors present evidence that IQ rises with age and with years of schooling completed. IQ may actually be a better measure of the environment facing children than the measure of environment used by Murray and Herrnstein. They use IQ to predict schooling, but schooling produces IQ. Hence, they are especially likely to find a strong measured effect of "IQ" on schooling.
The same remarks apply to their study of racial and ethnic differentials in socioeconomic outcomes. If racial differentials in environments affect ability and influence measured test scores, evidence that racial differentials weaken when ability is controlled for using regression methods does not rule out an important role for the environment in explaining performance in society. In the presence of measurement error in the environment, the authors' analysis will overstate the "true" effect of ability on those outcomes.
There are methods for addressing these problems, but Murray and Herrnstein do not use them. They should have tried a variety of measures of family background to explore the sensitivity of their reported results to the particular measures of family background they do use. A strict environmentalist could justifiably argue that the evidence reported by Murray and Herrnstein simply reveals the crudity of their measure of the environment and the strength of the correlation between the test score and their measure of environment.
One important technical point worth making here concerns the method used by the authors to measure standardized changes in IQ and family background. By its very construction as a measure that follows a bell curve, the "two-standard deviation" range in measured IQ used by the authors to gauge the sensitivity of outcomes to IQ represents a change in IQ ranging over 95 percent of the population. A "two-standard deviation" range of their family background index does not include 95 percent of the population, because that measure does not come from a bell curve. It may include as little as 75 percent of the population. By restricting the range of the environmental variable they understate the role of the environment in affecting outcomes relative to the role allocated to IQ.
Finally, the book fails due to a lack of coherence. The argument does not cumulate in a convincing way. Too many seams are visible. Its case against affirmative action and egalitarianism in education, and in favor of the use of testing in the workplace, does not require acceptance of a single ("g-loaded") scale of ability, or acceptance of the importance of heredity in producing socioeconomic inequality. The authors' evidence of growing stratification by cognitive ability in schools and workplaces does not require that they take a position on how the ability is produced. Yet the authors argue strenuously for their narrow view of ability and its heritability and thereby distract the reader's attention.
Nor do the two competing visions of the future of American society offered up in Part IV naturally flow from the arguments and evidence presented in the earlier parts of the book. The first dystopic vision relies on stronger sorting and heritability mechanisms than the authors have demonstrated actually operate in American society. Even if IQ is largely inherited, there is considerable scope for intergenerational economic mobility. The extreme pessimism of this scenario ignores the warnings issued by the authors that even among persons in the lowest ability grouping, there is still a lot of socially productive behavior. Their pessimistic vision relies on unsupported assumptions about the skill bias of future technological change and the inability of entrepreneurs--and social institutions--to efficiently utilize unskilled labor. This vision might be realized, but it reads more like a story borrowed from science fiction novels than a plausible extrapolation of existing social trends.
The second vision of communitarian harmony presented in the final chapter of the book is based on several implicit assumptions. The authors take it as self-evident that cognitively heterogeneous groups benefit both able and less-able members. That is an empirical statement about which the authors offer no evidence. If such heterogeneous associations are not mutually beneficial, strong forces of self-interest would arise that would promote segregation and separation along cognitive lines. In that case, their communitarian society of neighborhoods would only be viable if coercion were applied from central governments.
Cognitive stratification may be both economically efficient and socially desirable. Our cognitively stratified society may be a consequence of private choice, not governmental coercion. Murray and Herrnstein never discuss mechanisms or incentives that would lead persons to voluntarily embrace cognitively integrated local neighborhoods. They take it as self-evident that such neighborhoods would spontaneously emerge if central governments quit interfering in local communities.
Many of the other policy goals advocated by the authors could be embraced without any consideration of the problems--or benefits--of cognitive stratification. For this reason, their advocacy of these goals is not germane to this book. Simplifying the law, eliminating regulation, providing clearer moral and social rules, and eliminating restrictions on entry into business may differentially benefit the cognitively weak, but they are likely to benefit everyone else, too.
The authors' argument in support of local neighborhoods and small communities with cognitively mixed populations cries out for clarification. For each idyllic fable about the virtues of life in small communities, one could counter with fables of Peyton Place or the narrow-mindedness of the Babbitts of Main Street.
Had the authors been more cautious, they would have told the following defensible story: They have produced very convincing evidence that by the late teenage years, essential features of the skills and motivation of persons are determined. These features strongly influence individuals' performance in schools, in the market, and in other aspects of social life. The Armed Forces Qualifying Test seems to be a good measure of the skills affecting social performance. Using the components on which the test is based, rather than one composite score, would probably capture the diversity of abilities in the population even better.
The authors have no good way to separate genetic from social influences on social behavior. Their environmental data are too crude and the AFQT score they use is obtained too late in life to make a genetic-environmental distinction meaningful. The authors would require much finer measures of environmental variables than they have at their disposal to rule out the importance of family and society in determining individual outcomes.
Nonetheless, their evidence and the evidence assembled from many government skill-remediation programs for adults suggests that persons are not very malleable after their late teens or perhaps their early 20s. Successful interventions for such people are likely to be very costly. The literature suggests a particularly poor performance of educational remediation programs for adults of low cognitive ability as measured by AFQT and other cognitive tests.
To the extent that social interventions can upgrade skills, they are most likely to be effective when they are applied to the young. The fragments of evidence summarized in Chapter 17 of the book, and other evidence from high-intensity enriched-environment programs, point in this direction. This evidence is also consistent with the work of Thomas Sowell, who stresses the role of culture and values in shaping the expectations and motivations of young children. Job training and education are generally wasted on low-IQ adults. For this group, subsidies for employment may be justified, especially if work improves social behavior or is valued for its own sake. Economic efficiency is promoted by investing in the young. There is much evidence that learning is a cumulative, dynamic process. Learning begets learning. It is much easier to galvanize a young child than an illiterate young adult.
Future research should focus on growth and development in measured ability prior to age 15 (the age of the youngest person in the Murray-Herrnstein sample), because existing research indicates that values are formed and cognition is developed prior to that age. Genes may play some role, but culture and environment also contribute to ability and motivation. Much serious research in psychology indicates that motivation and attitude are as important--and possibly more important--for success than is raw IQ.
As for social policy, we should recognize that heterogeneity in experiences and endowments produces a wide range of cognitive skills and motivations. For a variety of reasons, treating persons fairly as individuals may lead to heterogeneity in outcomes among demographic groups. Denying individual heterogeneity by treating persons as members of demographic categories will produce disparities in productivity among demographic groups, reduce economic efficiency, and foster a sense of injustice among all participants in society.
Cracked Bell
James J. Heckman from the March 1995 issue
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, New York: The Free Press, 845 pages, $30.00
Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein have produced a controversial and well-written book about human differences, the sources of human differences, and how we should respond to those differences. The early reactions to the book in the popular press have been emotional and denunciatory, focusing almost exclusively on the authors' discussion of racial differences and the genetic basis for those differences. This is unfortunate. The book is not devoted exclusively to a discussion of racial differences, although it certainly considers them in detail. It is obvious that most reviewers of the book have not read it as a whole, if they have read it at all. It is also clear that in an age of rampant egalitarianism, discussion of differences in cognitive skills remains taboo. The authors deserve much praise for discussing a forbidden subject and thereby initiating a public discussion that challenges the egalitarian presumptions of our day.
Like Robert Reich in The Work of Nations and Mickey Kaus in The End of Equality, the authors are concerned about the growth of economic and social inequality in American society, a topic that dominates many contemporary political discussions. Unlike those authors, Murray and Herrnstein probe more deeply into the personal sources of inequality, devoting considerable attention to the genetic component of personal differences and presenting fresh empirical evidence about an important relationship between their measure of IQ and success in society at large. Like Reich and Kaus, Murray and Herrnstein worry about the consequences for the social order of the growing inequality in economic and social success between the "haves" and the "have nots," and the social and economic partitioning of high-skill, high-IQ persons away from low-skill, low-IQ persons.
This 845-page book covers an enormous and impressive range of topics. Its numerous tables and charts make close reading a challenge. Indeed, all but trained social scientists will be intimidated by the statistical details and by the complicated arguments used by the authors. Even more forbidding to most readers will be the hundreds of pages of footnotes and appendix tables that document the statistical analysis underlying the arguments in the text. Despite all this, the book is organized in easily summarized sections. It is accessible at one level to all readers who are willing to skip the details.
The book contains four parts. Part I updates Herrnstein's 1973 book IQ and the Meritocracy and documents that American society has become more stratified on the basis of intelligence than it was even one generation ago. Merit--treated here as synonymous with IQ--has become concentrated in schools and the workplace. This increase in cognitive stratification results from the realization of the meritocratic vision of access to institutions based on individual ability. Social class and parental income play weaker roles in regulating access to education and jobs than at any time in American history.
The authors go on to note a phenomenon not discussed in Herrnstein's book--that since the late 1970s, the economic returns to measured skills, and in particular education, have increased. This has created a growing gap between the wages and employment of the skilled and the unskilled. The authors note a strong, but by no means perfect, relationship between skill and IQ.
Part II presents original empirical research, combined with a synthesis of the existing empirical literature, that shows a strong relationship between the authors' measure of IQ and social performance. This portion of the book puts empirical flesh on Herrnstein's original bare-bones argument. Low-IQ persons are more likely to be in poverty, drop out of school, be unemployed or altogether idle, be on welfare, be bad parents, commit crimes, and withdraw from political activity than are high-IQ persons. In general, this relationship holds even after adjusting for the authors' measure of socioeconomic background.
The authors wish their readers to draw from this exercise the conclusion that nature--not just parental or social environment--plays an important role in explaining a variety of social pathologies. Taken literally, their research demonstrates that IQ, rather than socioeconomic background, plays the dominant role in generating differences in a variety of socially important outcomes among persons. The analysis uses data only for whites. By proceeding in this way, the authors establish the importance of IQ in accounting for individual differences without getting into the controversial issue of racial bias in IQ tests.
In Part III, they mention the unmentionable by directly analyzing the sources of ethnic differences in social outcomes and the role of their measure of IQ in accounting for these differences. They firmly and rather convincingly refute the critics of IQ and aptitude tests who claim that the tests are racially biased and unrelated to true productivity in schools or the workplace. They discuss the well-documented disparity between the distributions of IQ for blacks and whites, along with other ethnic disparities. Their empirical work substantiates the role of IQ in accounting for a considerable portion of ethnic differences in socioeconomic outcomes and demonstrates the concentration of low-IQ persons (of all races) in a variety of pathological categories. The higher rate of reproduction and immigration among the lower-IQ groups also receives attention, along with the consequences of this phenomenon for the American gene pool. They claim that the average IQ is declining in the United States.
Part IV really consists of two separate sections. The first section builds on the first three parts of the book and discusses the implications of the authors' findings for social policy. Murray and Herrnstein present a pessimistic summary of efforts to raise cognitive ability through social programs. This review of the ineffectiveness of most social programs harkens back to Murray's Losing Ground, except that now the cognitive limitations of individuals rather than perverse incentives created by the programs lead to their failure. The authors discuss the "dumbing down" of American public education and the shift in educational expenditures away from gifted children. Under the aegis of promoting equality, Rawlsian educational policy has taken resources away from the able and given them to the less able.
They also discuss affirmative action in colleges and the workplace. Murray and Herrnstein make the simple, powerful, and apparently very controversial point that disparities in intelligence and abilities among ethnic groups, combined with equality of opportunity at the individual level, will produce demographic disparities in college attendance, job hiring, and promotion rates. Such disparities often lead to interventions by governments enforcing anti-discrimination laws.
Murray and Herrnstein argue convincingly that employment tests banned by the courts as discriminatory at least partly predict productivity and are, if anything, biased in favor of minorities. Further, they make the claim that prohibitions against using the tests impair economic productivity and that "race-normed" adjustments of test scores misclassify workers, create tokenism in the workplace, and often stigmatize the intended recipients of government beneficence. The press has attacked this section of the book, as well as the section on racial differences in IQ, as racist in tone and content. In fact, the authors advocate the nonracist policy of treating persons as individuals rather than as members of racial groups.
The last two chapters of the book abandon the empirical focus. The penultimate chapter presents a bleak vision of an IQ-stratified meritocracy with a cognitive elite increasingly isolated from the rest of society. In this worst-case scenario, the affluent and the cognitive elite merge interests, in part because many members of the cognitive elite have become affluent. Together they form a ruling class. A deteriorating quality of life emerges for the cognitively feeble, who become economically and socially dysfunctional. Unable to cope with the complexity of modern society, they become wards of the state.
In the final chapter, the authors turn to Murray's In Pursuit as an alternative to their bleak vision of a cognitively stratified social order. They harken to a communitarian ideal in which places are found for all persons in cognitively integrated local neighborhoods. Following Murray's previous book, they suggest that removing power from the center and returningit to the community will produce vital neighborhoods that will find a place for everyone and foster dignity and self-respect. Simple rules that everyone can understand, and simple morality and justice that clearly define what is right and wrong, are the essential features of a viable communitarian social order comprising persons with diverse cognitive skills.
A rigorous, well-reasoned challenge to contemporary presumptions about equality, egalitarianism, and the malleability of human beings is long overdue. Had the authors taken more care in presenting their evidence and summarizing that of others, and had they woven their argument more closely, their book would be that challenge. Unfortunately, it is not.
The book fails for four main reasons. First, too much space is devoted to discussions of intrinsically irrelevant issues. Nothing central to the case for recognizing diversity in human abilities hinges on the issue of whether there is one "true ability" or whether there are multiple abilities--as common sense, much psychometric research, and the authors' own evidence indicate is the actual state of affairs. Despite this evidence, Murray and Herrnstein devote many pages to justifying a one-ability, or "g," model of human intelligence. Admitting that persons have multiple skills does not undermine the empirical case that heterogeneity in ability is an important fact of social and economic life. Indeed, acknowledging a multiplicity of skills emphasizes human diversity.
The long discussions of heredity also distract attention away from the main thrust of the argument and generate needless controversy. The authors acknowledge, as does most serious science on the matter, the difficulty of identifying separate genetic and environmental contributions to intelligence. Most scholars assign some weight to both sources, but the allocation of precise weights generates much well-deserved controversy. The authors fail to justify why it is useful to establish any particular set of weights or even a range of weights, except the special weight that assigns all credit to the genes.
This observation points to the second, more fundamental, reason why this book fails to provide an effective challenge to contemporary egalitarian social policy. One might oppose such policies on moral or ethical grounds. Instead, the authors choose an empirical approach. Yet they fail to develop the empirical case in a satisfactory or coherent manner.
Before I read this book, I thought that Murray and Herrnstein would do for policies aimed at reducing inequality what Murray did for poverty policy in Losing Ground, by documenting the failure of many social programs designed to boost the skills of the less able. Chapter 17 of their book discusses the mixed evidence on the success of early childhood interventions designed to boost IQ. By no means does the evidence they discuss rule out the possibility of boosting IQ through programs that enrich the learning environments of young children. Indeed, the authors acknowledge that there are strong indications that very intensive programs can be effective. Half-hearted interventions like Head Start are definitely not effective.
It is striking that the authors do not discuss the costs and benefits of various interventions. It is in these terms that public policy discussions regarding skill-enhancement programs are usually conducted. The authors seek to short-circuit all of the hard work required to make credible cost-benefit calculations by claiming that there is a genetic basis for skill differences.
But estimates of a genetic component of skills are irrelevant to the requisite cost-benefit analysis unless it can be established that all differences are genetic. No one, including the authors, claims that this is so. Only if all differences are genetic--and if no offsets to genetic endowments can be created by families, communities, or governments--would it be possible to use the information on the genetic contribution of skills to make the required cost-benefit analysis. In that extreme case, which no one accepts as empirically relevant, the costs of making change are infinite. Genetics and heritability determine all. Social programs cannot be effective.
Equally obvious is the point that knowing that all skill components are environmentally determined does not justify interventions. Knowing that we can teach calculus to a child with an IQ of 65 but only at an enormous cost would not justify a policy of doing so, except in the minds of zealots committed to extreme egalitarian visions. Discussions of nature versus nurture are irrelevant to practical policy discussions couched in terms of costs and benefits. An evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions is required to justify or oppose social policy designed to cope with inequality. The authors do not provide a systematic evaluation of such programs. The Bell Curve fails to present the hard information required to settle these matters on the factual grounds chosen by the authors.
This point is particularly telling for their assessment of education. The authors offer an inconsistent treatment of education throughout the book. Early on, they highlight the finding of many recent studies--that the economic return to education has increased in the past 15 years or so. The gaps between the wages of college-educated workers and less-educated workers has widened. This phenomenon has contributed to growing income inequality.
They also establish that more-able persons tend to attain higher levels of schooling. They acknowledge--and then go on to forget--that the relationship between education and ability is far from exact. In fact, throughout much of the book, they equate ability and education and implicitly assume that the economic returns to ability drive the economic returns to education.
On the empirical grounds chosen by the authors, this implicit assumption is false. Their own evidence (buried in Appendix 6), as well as a vast literature in empirical social science, clearly indicates that controlling for ability lowers but does not eliminate the return to schooling measured in terms of earnings. The evidence on this point is consistent across many studies. Controlling for their measure of ability, the returns to education sometimes fall by as much as 25 percent, but they never go to zero.
Ability and education are not the same thing, and both have economic rewards. Accounting for ability weakens but hardly eliminates the role of education in raising earnings. On average, an extra year of schooling still increases earnings by at least a substantial 6 percent to 8 percent. So there is room for social policy to eliminate earnings differentials between persons of the same ability level. Neither The Bell Curve nor the literature on schooling provides much evidence on the all-important question of the efficacy of education as a tool for equalizing the earnings of persons of different ability levels.
What little is known indicates that ability--or IQ--is not a fixed trait for the young (persons up to age 8 or so). Herrnstein noted this in IQ and the Meritocracy. Sustained high-intensity investments in the education of young children, including such parental activities as reading and responding to children, stimulate learning and further education. Good environments promote learning for young children at all levels of ability. In this sense, there is fragmentary evidence that enriched education can be a good investment even for children of low initial ability, because it stimulates cumulative learning processes and may raise ability. There is much more negative evidence for adults, where ability is a more stable trait. For low-ability adults, there is little evidence that educational investments are socially profitable.
The authors also disregard much recent empirical evidence by Richard Murnane and others that indicates the increasing returns to the measures used by Murray and Herrnstein account for only a small portion of the recent increase in the economic return to schooling. While payments for ability have increased somewhat in the past 15 years, there remains a substantial increase in the payment for education unrelated to the authors' measure of ability.
It is unfortunate that the authors disregard this important evidence. Operating on the empirical playing field chosen by Murray and Herrnstein, a die-hard interventionist could find much credible evidence to support an active social policy to eliminate skill differentials. Their implicit claim that ability drives the economic return to education, and the recent increase in the economic return to education, fails to pass empirical muster.
The third source of The Bell Curve's failure lies in the details of its analysis of the impact of ability on measured outcomes such as earnings. In their empirical research, the authors examine how well one measure of ability explains a variety of economic and social behaviors. They pit their ability measure against a measure of the socioeconomic status of persons when they were children. The authors intend this contrast to reveal the relative importance of "genes" and "environment" in accounting for behavior. Outcomes are much more sensitive to their measure of ability than to their measure of socioeconomic status. Large changes in the socioeconomic variables have weak effects on the outcome measures, while small changes in ability have large effects on the same outcome measures.
This sort of empirical exercise prospers--or founders--on the details. The credibility of any empirical study depends on the care taken by the analyst in defining and measuring concepts, and in interpreting conclusions drawn from the data. It is at this point that the book becomes a policy polemic rather than a scholarly study of human differences.
First, consider the definitions of the two key variables used in the authors' empirical study: IQ and family background. In their empirical analysis, the operational definition of IQ is the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score, which is based on an aggregation of a subset of 10 separate exams given to more than 12,000 youth in 1980. The youth were 15 to 23 years old when the tests were administered. These tests were designed to predict success in military training schools, and there is much evidence that they do so, although by no means are they 100-percent reliable. Most of these tests appear to be achievement tests rather than ability tests (i.e., they partly measure factual knowledge and not pure ability). A subset of four tests was assembled to define the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score used by Murray and Herrnstein.
Ironically, the authors delete from their composite AFQT score a timed test of numerical operations because it is not highly correlated with the other tests. Yet it is well known that in the data they use, this subtest is the single best predictor of earnings of all the AFQT test components. The fact that many of the subtests are only weakly correlated with each other, and that the best predictor of earnings is only weakly correlated with their "g-loaded" score, only heightens doubts that a single-ability model is a satisfactory description of human intelligence. It also drives home the point that the "g-loading" so strongly emphasized by Murray and Herrnstein measures only agreement among tests--not predictive power for socioeconomic outcomes. By the same token, one could also argue that the authors have biased their empirical analysis against the conclusions they obtain by disregarding the test with the greatest predictive power.
More disturbing is the authors' treatment of family background. The index is based on parental education and occupational status, and on family income measured at one point in the entire life cycle of the child. For many young adults, the family-income measure is entirely missing and is omitted from the construction of the index.
The IQ measure used by Murray and Herrnstein is taken rather late in the life cycle of the child. (Recall that the IQ test is administered to youth 15 to 23 years old.) Many analysts suspect that IQ as measured by tests administered after early childhood reflects the outcome of social and cultural influences. The authors attempt to eliminate these influences by a standard statistical method called regression analysis.
But the standard statistical methods used by Murray and Herrnstein are vulnerable to measurement error. It would be incredible if 15 to 23 years of environmental influences, including the nurturing of parents, the resources they spent on a child, their cultural environment, their interaction with their children, and the influence of the larger community could be summarized by a single measure of education, occupation, and family income in one year. If environment is poorly measured but affects the test score--and there is solid evidence of environmental impacts on test scores--then Murray and Herrnstein's finding that IQ has a stronger impact on socioeconomic outcomes than the measured environment may simply arise from the poor quality of the measure of the environment.
The authors present evidence that IQ rises with age and with years of schooling completed. IQ may actually be a better measure of the environment facing children than the measure of environment used by Murray and Herrnstein. They use IQ to predict schooling, but schooling produces IQ. Hence, they are especially likely to find a strong measured effect of "IQ" on schooling.
The same remarks apply to their study of racial and ethnic differentials in socioeconomic outcomes. If racial differentials in environments affect ability and influence measured test scores, evidence that racial differentials weaken when ability is controlled for using regression methods does not rule out an important role for the environment in explaining performance in society. In the presence of measurement error in the environment, the authors' analysis will overstate the "true" effect of ability on those outcomes.
There are methods for addressing these problems, but Murray and Herrnstein do not use them. They should have tried a variety of measures of family background to explore the sensitivity of their reported results to the particular measures of family background they do use. A strict environmentalist could justifiably argue that the evidence reported by Murray and Herrnstein simply reveals the crudity of their measure of the environment and the strength of the correlation between the test score and their measure of environment.
One important technical point worth making here concerns the method used by the authors to measure standardized changes in IQ and family background. By its very construction as a measure that follows a bell curve, the "two-standard deviation" range in measured IQ used by the authors to gauge the sensitivity of outcomes to IQ represents a change in IQ ranging over 95 percent of the population. A "two-standard deviation" range of their family background index does not include 95 percent of the population, because that measure does not come from a bell curve. It may include as little as 75 percent of the population. By restricting the range of the environmental variable they understate the role of the environment in affecting outcomes relative to the role allocated to IQ.
Finally, the book fails due to a lack of coherence. The argument does not cumulate in a convincing way. Too many seams are visible. Its case against affirmative action and egalitarianism in education, and in favor of the use of testing in the workplace, does not require acceptance of a single ("g-loaded") scale of ability, or acceptance of the importance of heredity in producing socioeconomic inequality. The authors' evidence of growing stratification by cognitive ability in schools and workplaces does not require that they take a position on how the ability is produced. Yet the authors argue strenuously for their narrow view of ability and its heritability and thereby distract the reader's attention.
Nor do the two competing visions of the future of American society offered up in Part IV naturally flow from the arguments and evidence presented in the earlier parts of the book. The first dystopic vision relies on stronger sorting and heritability mechanisms than the authors have demonstrated actually operate in American society. Even if IQ is largely inherited, there is considerable scope for intergenerational economic mobility. The extreme pessimism of this scenario ignores the warnings issued by the authors that even among persons in the lowest ability grouping, there is still a lot of socially productive behavior. Their pessimistic vision relies on unsupported assumptions about the skill bias of future technological change and the inability of entrepreneurs--and social institutions--to efficiently utilize unskilled labor. This vision might be realized, but it reads more like a story borrowed from science fiction novels than a plausible extrapolation of existing social trends.
The second vision of communitarian harmony presented in the final chapter of the book is based on several implicit assumptions. The authors take it as self-evident that cognitively heterogeneous groups benefit both able and less-able members. That is an empirical statement about which the authors offer no evidence. If such heterogeneous associations are not mutually beneficial, strong forces of self-interest would arise that would promote segregation and separation along cognitive lines. In that case, their communitarian society of neighborhoods would only be viable if coercion were applied from central governments.
Cognitive stratification may be both economically efficient and socially desirable. Our cognitively stratified society may be a consequence of private choice, not governmental coercion. Murray and Herrnstein never discuss mechanisms or incentives that would lead persons to voluntarily embrace cognitively integrated local neighborhoods. They take it as self-evident that such neighborhoods would spontaneously emerge if central governments quit interfering in local communities.
Many of the other policy goals advocated by the authors could be embraced without any consideration of the problems--or benefits--of cognitive stratification. For this reason, their advocacy of these goals is not germane to this book. Simplifying the law, eliminating regulation, providing clearer moral and social rules, and eliminating restrictions on entry into business may differentially benefit the cognitively weak, but they are likely to benefit everyone else, too.
The authors' argument in support of local neighborhoods and small communities with cognitively mixed populations cries out for clarification. For each idyllic fable about the virtues of life in small communities, one could counter with fables of Peyton Place or the narrow-mindedness of the Babbitts of Main Street.
Had the authors been more cautious, they would have told the following defensible story: They have produced very convincing evidence that by the late teenage years, essential features of the skills and motivation of persons are determined. These features strongly influence individuals' performance in schools, in the market, and in other aspects of social life. The Armed Forces Qualifying Test seems to be a good measure of the skills affecting social performance. Using the components on which the test is based, rather than one composite score, would probably capture the diversity of abilities in the population even better.
The authors have no good way to separate genetic from social influences on social behavior. Their environmental data are too crude and the AFQT score they use is obtained too late in life to make a genetic-environmental distinction meaningful. The authors would require much finer measures of environmental variables than they have at their disposal to rule out the importance of family and society in determining individual outcomes.
Nonetheless, their evidence and the evidence assembled from many government skill-remediation programs for adults suggests that persons are not very malleable after their late teens or perhaps their early 20s. Successful interventions for such people are likely to be very costly. The literature suggests a particularly poor performance of educational remediation programs for adults of low cognitive ability as measured by AFQT and other cognitive tests.
To the extent that social interventions can upgrade skills, they are most likely to be effective when they are applied to the young. The fragments of evidence summarized in Chapter 17 of the book, and other evidence from high-intensity enriched-environment programs, point in this direction. This evidence is also consistent with the work of Thomas Sowell, who stresses the role of culture and values in shaping the expectations and motivations of young children. Job training and education are generally wasted on low-IQ adults. For this group, subsidies for employment may be justified, especially if work improves social behavior or is valued for its own sake. Economic efficiency is promoted by investing in the young. There is much evidence that learning is a cumulative, dynamic process. Learning begets learning. It is much easier to galvanize a young child than an illiterate young adult.
Future research should focus on growth and development in measured ability prior to age 15 (the age of the youngest person in the Murray-Herrnstein sample), because existing research indicates that values are formed and cognition is developed prior to that age. Genes may play some role, but culture and environment also contribute to ability and motivation. Much serious research in psychology indicates that motivation and attitude are as important--and possibly more important--for success than is raw IQ.
As for social policy, we should recognize that heterogeneity in experiences and endowments produces a wide range of cognitive skills and motivations. For a variety of reasons, treating persons fairly as individuals may lead to heterogeneity in outcomes among demographic groups. Denying individual heterogeneity by treating persons as members of demographic categories will produce disparities in productivity among demographic groups, reduce economic efficiency, and foster a sense of injustice among all participants in society.
ADD THIS FOLLOWING STORY ABOUT THE RACIAL CHASM IN EDUCATION...,
Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state.
The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.
One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point-something that occurs to even the dimmest white students-blacks just tried to yell over each other.
It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down.
They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.
Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again- just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and
simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!”
The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would
suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”
Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music.
Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back.
They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim-in the crudest terms imaginable-that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, “She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh.”
So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.
Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students-there are-but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.
“Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.
“Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?” I ask. Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, “You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson.”
“Juicy” is a colorful black expression for the buttocks.
Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike Whites, who tread gingerly around the Subject of race, they can be brutally to The point. Once I needed to send a student To the office to deliver a message. I Asked for volunteers, and suddenly you Would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”
For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.
It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.
Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.
Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”
My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”
“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.
She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.
Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.
Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.
My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one student explained, “Get dat green.”
There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.
Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all- well-black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.
One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.
How the world looks to blacks One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”
I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!” One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn’t like black people.
“Do you think I really hate black people?” “Yeah.” “Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?” “You just do.” “Why do you say that?”
He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.
My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family.
From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, “Where da black folk?!” The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.
Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have “good hair.” Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive. Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: “You fat, Ridario!” Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, “You wish you light skinned.”
They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.
My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.
Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.
What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. I’ve witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, “When you gonna go wit’ me?”
There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, “I don’t wanna go out with you!” The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no.
There is only one response from the black boy: “You racis’.” Many girls-all too many-actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.
There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks-especially the boys.
Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.
Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.
The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.
There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.
Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don’t know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.
Aside from the police officers constantly on patrol, a sure sign that you My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanics. Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans.
Security guards are everywhere in black schools-we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.
There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl-black or white-became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.
One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.
One day, I asked him, “Why do you come to school?”
He wouldn’t answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: “He get dat green and get dem females.”
“What is the green?” I asked. “Money or dope?” “Both,” said Yidarius with a smile.
A very fat black interrupted from across the room: “We get dat lunch,” Mr. Jackson. “We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss.” He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day. “Nigga, we know’d you be lovin’ brickfuss!” shouts another student.
Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good.
Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.
How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy-in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers-and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.
One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food-not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.
There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level. The solution is more diversity-or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need handson instruction and more group work.
Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.
Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.
Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat’s office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group-I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc.-sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: “These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?”
Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. “That one.”
The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.
One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point-something that occurs to even the dimmest white students-blacks just tried to yell over each other.
It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down.
They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.
Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again- just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and
simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!”
The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would
suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”
Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music.
Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back.
They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim-in the crudest terms imaginable-that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, “She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh.”
So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.
Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students-there are-but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.
“Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.
“Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?” I ask. Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, “You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson.”
“Juicy” is a colorful black expression for the buttocks.
Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike Whites, who tread gingerly around the Subject of race, they can be brutally to The point. Once I needed to send a student To the office to deliver a message. I Asked for volunteers, and suddenly you Would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”
For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.
It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.
Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.
Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”
My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”
“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.
She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.
Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.
Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.
My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one student explained, “Get dat green.”
There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.
Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all- well-black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.
One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.
How the world looks to blacks One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”
I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!” One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn’t like black people.
“Do you think I really hate black people?” “Yeah.” “Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?” “You just do.” “Why do you say that?”
He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.
My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family.
From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, “Where da black folk?!” The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.
Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have “good hair.” Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive. Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: “You fat, Ridario!” Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, “You wish you light skinned.”
They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.
My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.
Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.
What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. I’ve witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, “When you gonna go wit’ me?”
There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, “I don’t wanna go out with you!” The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no.
There is only one response from the black boy: “You racis’.” Many girls-all too many-actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.
There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks-especially the boys.
Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.
Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.
The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.
There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.
Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don’t know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.
Aside from the police officers constantly on patrol, a sure sign that you My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanics. Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans.
Security guards are everywhere in black schools-we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.
There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl-black or white-became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.
One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.
One day, I asked him, “Why do you come to school?”
He wouldn’t answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: “He get dat green and get dem females.”
“What is the green?” I asked. “Money or dope?” “Both,” said Yidarius with a smile.
A very fat black interrupted from across the room: “We get dat lunch,” Mr. Jackson. “We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss.” He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day. “Nigga, we know’d you be lovin’ brickfuss!” shouts another student.
Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good.
Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.
How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy-in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers-and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.
One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food-not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.
There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level. The solution is more diversity-or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need handson instruction and more group work.
Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.
Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.
Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat’s office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group-I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc.-sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: “These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?”
Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. “That one.”
See the comments relating to the above post here, same story, different location...,
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