Posted on 12/02/2013 9:09:37 AM PST by jazusamo
Depressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so. But both may have to do some rethinking, in light of radically different news from England.
The November 9th-15th issue of the distinguished British magazine "The Economist" reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England's schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time — as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time.
At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time.
"The Economist" points out that, in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students in any London borough.
These data might seem to be some kind of fluke, but they confirm the observations in a book titled "Life at the Bottom" by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. He said that, among the patients he treated in a hospital near a low-income housing project, he could not recall any white 16-year-old who could multiply nine by seven. Some could not even do three times seven.
What jolts us is not only that this phenomenon is so different from what we are used to seeing in the United States, but also that it fits neither the genetic nor the environmental explanation of black-white educational differences here.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
There are differences to be sure. Retarded and autistic people are an example. But, with hard work anyone can improve and who is to say what a person can achieve if they don’t give up.
I do not believe there is some absolute limit to learning. It is an ongoing process that by it’s definition extends a persons potential as he learns.
Well, we’ll have to disagree.
Human intelligence, like just about every other human characteristic, can be plotted on a normal distribution or bell curve.
“Retarded people” are merely those located towards the left side of the curve, not some separate and distinct category. There are about as many highly intelligent people as retarded ones, for the same distribution reasons.
The vast majority are in the middle, but where you are within this middle group has enormous impact on your potential to achieve.
Liberals, and apparently many conservatives, like to think there are no real differences between humans when it comes to intelligence. I would prefer that myself. But the cold hard facts of reality show it not to be true. If there were no connection to differential distribution by ethnicity, it wouldn’t even be controversial.
Reality doesn’t change to align with your beliefs, or mine.
Well, then why do highly intelligent people do some extremely dumb things? Intelligence measurement is not a science at all.It’s more like educated guesswork.
That tends to be the case.
For the most part an intact family means that the child will do better then their peers from broken families.
Make of that what you will.
That a person has high intelligence does not mean he will use it wisely.
Intelligence is just a tool. One effect of this is that an intelligent person can screw up his life more efficiently, just like he can do just about anything else more efficiently.
I believe it all comes back to the fact that there is a real difference between intelligence and wisdom.
I don't think that the least intelligent of any group are gathering at the top rungs of society. The underachieving individuals discussed in this article will disproportionately be made up of the less intelligent, particularly in the white population who've been in English society for centuries.
What Darwin described as “suvival of the fittest” is actually about which individuals are able to reproduce more. Until recent history, the rich had more kids (both by wives and by mistresses) and the poor had fewer(because they starved).
In the absense of welfare, poor women would be working at taking care of the kids of the rich, instead of having a dozen of their own.
Some people are “book smart” and some people are “street smart”. The difference comes from what you spend your time doing, and getting experience with.
In sixth grade we had a student teacher that brought in a copy of "Classics by Poe."
I told her it looked interesting and asked if I could borrow it over the weekend and promised to take good care of it. she kind of laughed and my teacher told her to lend it to me overnight. I took it home and read "The cask of amontillado", and "The pit and the pendulum" and "A premature burial".
The next day she asked if I had finished a story and I told her "The cask of amontillado". She asked me about the characters, setting etc.
When she got done she said she was impressed. My teacher then asked if I had read any of the others. I proceeded to describe the other two stories in detail.
I owe everything to my parents belief that we are not limited by what others say.
A person's level of success will be a combination of nature and nurture. If a person's "nurture" score would be 2 out of 100, however, I'm not sure how much it matters whether their "nature" score would be 10 or 90. The highest levels of success would be out of reach for most people, no matter how well they were raised, but a person of average intelligence raised well could likely outperform a much more intelligent person who was raised badly.
My husband’s ancestors lived in very poor conditions in 19th century London. They did not stay poor, but worked to improve their lives. My husband has an extremely high IQ. I’m sure that his ancestors were not stupid, just part of the Dickensian scene of the times. Live or die; no welfare checks.
Today’s underachieving whites in England are the product of 20th century coddling of underachievement, accompanied by generous ‘supplements’ that make going to actual workplaces an irrational economic decision.
This is mirrored in American cities, viz Detroit: where not working in the traditional economy has become a way of life. Why should these kids study in school? Their mothers see no reason to demand study. Their fathers are faint figments. The kids may not have, on average, a terrific IQ, but their lifestyle stifles any attempt at accomplishment. Also, those who do see a reason to escape these conditions, and manage to do so, leave behind a cohort of more and more helplessness. It really is criminal to waste human life, and demanding nothing from them in community effort is a waste caused by ‘compassionate’ progressive politicians.
Agreed.
IOW, we can degrade the intelligence of Einstein to a severely retarded level by a wide variety of methods.
But we have absolutely no idea how to produce Einstein-level intelligence in someone who is "naturally" of low or even moderately above-average intelligence.
Or, any idiot can make fish soup out of an aquarium. Nobody but God can make an aquarium out of fish soup.
Government has always channeled money to the idle classes. Rome did it. It is how a ruling group keeps itself in power. It always has a horde of bodies that it can call out to attack the opposition or to vote for the rulers who give them the money. It always has been. It always will be except with a new government of a new society that hasn’t developed such idle classes yet. Alas, we cannot return to that new condition such as pertained in 1787.
I quite agree with your parents.
What you describe is a situation where your potential was not measured accurately.
That is entirely different from saying you exceeded your potential.
I remember those tests. I think I took the Iowa Basic version.
They made no claim to measure potential, only learned ability.
That's precisely my point. The intelligent and capable among the English poor have mostly worked their way up through education and hard work over centuries and generations. It's regrettable, but there would be some with lower intelligence who would not be capable of that, and not be lucky enough to come upon opportunites to find a better life.
That's been going on forever, but the nanny state has only been around since the 1960s in most nations. Sure, some have lost ambition and become dependent on government, but I'd bet anything there is core of lower intelligent families whose children are in those underachieving white areas Sowell wrote about, and those families have been underachievers for generations.
England's acute awareness of class serves a very similar societal function as race does in the US.
Envy is incubated and nurtured among the "have nots" as a way to gain political power.
When indulged, such a character defect is far more limiting than a few IQ points.
There was a time when no one wanted to admit to having been victimized, to come forth and CLAIM to be a victim as if it entitled you to special status would have been unimaginable. Little boys who came home from school with a black eye did not admit to how they had been bullied, they said, “You ought to see the other guy, he has two black eyes and a bloody nose, I beat him good.” Fathers did not encourage their children to claim victimhood, they taught them to stand up for themselves. It was an entirely different world and in my opinion at least, a much better world.
Actually, the more I think about it, I believe it was in a book called “Why Big, Fierce Animals Are Rare” by Paul A. Colinvaux.
I’m not sure. It was a very interesting book,regardless
In today’s world the ‘son’ hits his head against a light pole and tells him mom someone tried to beat him up. Dad’s not in the home and if he was ‘Mom’ would tell him her ‘darling’ need unconditional love...
My thought is this: Perhaps the whites who are eligible for free meals are eligible because they come from parents of lower intelligence, while perhaps the blacks who are eligible come from parents who are simply lazy.
In other words, this study could be flawed in using eligibility for benefits as a criteria. Different people are eligible for benefits for different reasons, some by circumstance and some by design.
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