Posted on 05/22/2006 12:11:31 PM PDT by Borges
Copies may well be in the reference section. :)
You're choosing an over-the-top example to make your point, but at least the kids would learn to spell "Marquis" correctly. >:)
I'm for banning A Separate Peace (for boring us youth with pedestrian writing), Walden (for FRAUD, as Thoreau merely lived in the "woods" by his mother's house and had her cook for him on a daily basis), and ANYTHING by Steinbeck (the most overrated American writer after affirmative action poster girl Toni Morrison).
How about Fanny Hill, Delta of Venus, and the Story of O for the impressionable minds of our youth?
Whether it's true or not, Walden is one of the great American books. It's a lot more ironic then people let on.
Anna Karenina?
So you DENY the demonstrated fact that there are discrepancies in IQ among races and ethnic groups, or were there other aspects of that rather boring tome that you thought were fiction?
Well, let's take it back a step. I think innate intelligence is a nebulous concept in and of itself. IQ is a poor measure of innate intelligence, one that's susceptible to all kinds of influences, most obviously from education and socialization. Third, because genetic variation within "racial" groups is so great, even if there is a distribution of IQs across races, it doesn't carry any meaning -- you're attempting to generalize about a population that isn't a population. There are definitely racist implications of The Bell Curve but I fail to see any scientific or scholarly.
Creative editing gives away the phonies every time.
That's fine; at least your opinion is based on actually having READ it.
Correct on both points.
I believe that the US Supreme Court has ruled that school boards cannot simply "ban books." They must have established procedures for book evaluation and procurement and they must follow these procedures.
[I am afraid this reply ended up being a lot longer than I has anticipated. Sorry!]
Social sciences tend to concern themselves with groups not individuals. The differences between some groups were large, in the order of one standard deviation, if I remember correctly. We would expect such large differences between group averages to show up as group effects (e.g. average education level, average incomes). Just because there is variation within a group does not invalidate the average.
Sociologists, pollsters, and economists will divide people into groups as part of their studies. Pollsters will tell you that white, married males are more likely to be Republican while black females are more likely to be Democrat. That does not mean that every white, married male votes Republican or every black female votes Democrat. What it does mean is that if you meet a white married male he is more likely to be a Republican and a black female is more likely to be a Democrat. Just because some will not match expectations does not mean the expectation (average) is incorrect.
While race can be a slippery concept I believe that the majority of white, black or Asian people would be comfortable putting themselves (or others) in their respective group, so from the point of social studies it is not meaningless. Different groups do not need to be completely "genetically homogenous" to be separable. We know that different groups suffer increased tendencies towards certain diseases (sickle-cell disease for black people and Tay-Sachs for Jewish people) so group tendencies can exist across groups that are not perfectly homogenous.
Unlike the "hard" sciences, proofs are harder to come by in the social sciences. That means that books like "The Bell Curve" and the studies it used will always be open to question, but to call the book fiction seems grossly unfair.
Leaving aside the one chapter on race, the message of "The Bell Curve" was:
+ That intelligence is important.
+ That there is likely a genetic component to intelligence.
+ Tasks that require high levels of general intelligence are rewarded increasingly well while tasks that do not require high levels of general intelligence have seen falling rewards.
+ Society has become more successful at separating people by intelligence (i.e. putting them in positions that require intelligence).
+ Increased mobility means that smart people will tend to gravitate towards places with other smart people, denying their smarts to the communities they left.
+ The last two points will lead to an increasingly segregated society with wealthy "cognitive elites" living apart from the rest, with less and less contact with those who are not part of that "cognitive elite". This segregation could lead to social, political and economic strains.
All of those points are open to argument but do not deserve been written off as fiction.
As an aside I do not believe that genes (or even intelligence) as destiny but will not write them off as unimportant.
"Whether it's true or not, Walden is one of the great American books. It's a lot more ironic then people let on."
You are correct. It was my practice, from age 21 through age 50, to read "On Walden Pond" on my birthday each year. After age 50, I could pretty much recite the thing verbatum, and gave it up.
It's not as simple a little book as one might think, if read carefully.
Or better yet forget about the whole public school thing.
BTW, this thread should be retitled "the death of common decency leads to the death of common sense."
In any case, that's merely a tangent. The reality is that this lady's a boob. Sorry.
Don't be sorry, so are you.
Anyone who thinks there should be no standards on what is recommended to teens to be read is a boob, sorry.
Are you even bothering to read my posts, or is it the thinking-about-them part that's throwing you off? If you can spin "this lady's standards are stupid" into "there shouldn't be standards", you're absolutely beyond help. LOL.
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