That could become the liberal rallying cry, but none of that will work (because liberals only want to treat symptoms, not causes).
As someone pointed out in an earlier post, children are born with the genetically programmed potential to reach a certain IQ. But it takes a good environment to optimize brain development so that it reaches its maximum possible IQ.
There are three factors that must be optimized: nutrition, intellectual stimulation, and overall health.
The role of nutrition is to ensure that the body has sufficient raw material to support maximal brain growth. I remember reading a study done on starving kids in Africa; one group of kids received a nutritious diet containing all of the food groups. The other group received the same diet, but without meat (the calories were replaced by oil). After a period of time, the kids eating the complete diet had, on average, IQ scores 6 points higher than the kids on the meat-free diet. This deficit is not likely to be reversed by giving the vegetarian kids meat, since the IQ deficit reflects stunted brain development at a time when the brain is in a crucial growth phase.
The role of intellectual stimulation is to encourage full growth of the parts of the brain involved with reasoning. The brain is a lot like a muscle: areas that are not stimulated tend to not develop. Animal studies show, for example, that depriving an infant animal of sight in one eye causes irreversible developmental aberrations in the visual cortex. This phenomenon is the basis of eye patch treatment for young children exhibiting lazy eye: as long as the condition is caught early enough, an eye patch can train the weak eye to see. But older children do not benefit from such treatment. Once a certain level of maturity is reached, those early deficits of stimulation can never be reversed.
Overall health plays a role, too. Infectious disease is one of the biggest threats to overall health--a child who is sick all the time puts their nutritional resources towards surviving the illness. The same goes for serious injury. So, in that respect, infectious disease or serious injury is similar to nutritional deficiency. Also, many diseases damage the brain. Anything that causes a high fever is potentially brain damaging; some diseases attack the brain specifically. Measles can cause permanent brain damage; meningitis is very likely to cause brain damage. By protecting a kid against disease and injury, the child's body can put all of the resources into proper brain development.
Clearly, all of those factors are magnified in extremely poor families. While poor people can and do provide their kids with the best nutrition, health care, and intellectual stimulation possible within their means, other poor people do not. Within the "poverty culture", as I call it, there are a lot of negative influences on children's proper neurological development. As long as that culture is not addressed, none of the other factors are going to change--because those indoctrinated into that culture will resist being taught about nutrition, intellectually engaging children, and maintaining health--and the poor will remain poor.
“.....For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal—”social justice”—is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. “Social Justice” for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.
Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.
But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.
No matter how opportunistically the left’s agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which “social justice” prevails.”....
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