We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

[FRED]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Here is the official iTulip position on race:

As anyone can see, there are significant differences among races of humans, but the similarity of human traits among races are far more significant and relevant from the viewpoint of economic, political, and social policy, the purview of this site. In other words, human races can be thought of as 90% similar to other races and 10% unique. Members who emphasize and focus on the 10% differences among human races and ignore the 90% similarity are, whether they know it or not, expressing racist sentiments and will be banned. They have no place in our community.

[flintlock]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Nice dig against "the other", c1ue.

Isn't it great that there exists some ethnicity out there that can still serve as the target for your own bigotry? Without rural white men in the south, who'd be left to go after?

Good point!

[flintlock]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

My point is IQ is overrated.

Exactly! Intelligence is so incredibly complex, I've never been convinced we know how to measure it effectively. I've seen some pretty smart people do some unbelievably stupid things. People with multiple degrees, who lack almost any common sense, or who's personal lives are constantly in complete disarray, despite the fact it's obvious what the problem is. Differences in work ethic and values can also account for the difference in success, probably just as much as intelligence. But then its hard to measure those like you can IQ score.

[flintlock]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Really? Do you think the population of Africa stayed stagnant for 20,000 years because they used birth control LOL. The murder rate in Africa is 1600% higher than Europe and given the poor record keeping in Africa, the true rate must be substantially higher. The fact you don't see many definable wars in some part of the world have to do with lack of cohesive groups, capability, weaponry and the ability to supply large armies with supplies. Even today Africans have essentially no manufacturing base to supply an army with weapons and no government competent enough to do anything more than steal aid from U.S. and European charity.

Your claim of "No one comes close to Europeans for waging wars of near-total destruction..." ignore such atrocities as The Khmer Rouge that wiped out 21% of the Cambodian population in 3 years and Rwanda killing off 800,000 of it's people or 12% in Just one month. WWII for instance lasted 6 years and resulted in the deaths of 5% of the populations at war. Even when one factors in the wars, the life expectancy of a European over the last millennium was higher than any other population the world over.

Excellent examples. Anyone who thinks any particular race has the historical lock on atrocities and making war needs to dig deeper into their history books. HUMAN NATURE is the culprit here, not race. I doubt we will ever see a day when war and killing is not the norm.

[flintlock]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Why don't you tell us where you live Don? Where did you grow up? How often, really, do you deal with low IQ blacks and hispanics outside of using them as slave labor?

Why don't you move to someplace like Detroit? Or Cincinatti? Or the South Side of Chicago?

Please, tell us how you are the pinnacle of tolerance and diversity.

Allow me to turn this question around on you Serge. Have you lived outside of your urban, multi-cultural area? Have you spent any time in the overwhelmingly White rural areas of North Georgia? Because I have. And I can assure you that if you spent much time around some of these people, you would quickly lose your ideas of any superiority of White IQ. Dumb is dumb, with plenty to go around.

That is one place I agree with you. The US is sinking fast in terms of intelligence. And this pretty much assures it's destruction as we know it. But it won't be because of one particular group. It will be because we have a system that protects the stupid and encourages them to continue reproducing with no negative consequences. In the past being stupid would get you killed. Victorian servants often required the permission of their employers to get married. In Elizabethan times, its amazing how many laws were enforced that severely punished people for irresponsible behavior. Rule #1 was that you didn't have children out of wedlock or that you could not take care of. The state rightly saw this as a potential burden on them and would severely punish anything that would lead to this. You could be branded for begging. There were a lot of reasons NOT to be dumb. Of course today its seen as a badge of honor for some. ( see British soccer, Jackass TV show, etc)

I find that people are usually not as smart as they think they are, nor are people as dumb as they may appear to be.

[Dave Stratman]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Firstly, I'd like to say that you haven't read the Bell Curve. It's really an extremely dry book using statistics a person like yourself isn't capable of understanding. I'm sure you read many reviews that have colored your views, but had you read the book - it deals specifically with the public policy matters that are of utmost importance and to which I directly refer.

While millions of people like yourself obsess over building this castle in the sky that will lead your particular favored non-white group to prosperity, the reality on the ground is one of increasing criminality, dependence on the state, social dysfunction, and outright nihilism.

These people will not become doctors and lawyers as much as you want to believe it is evil racists like me who are preventing them from achieving their potential.

There is a place for the less intelligent, and it starts with a broad economy that accommodates people of every ability. Reviving industry alone would do wonders to giving meaningful employment to those of below average intelligence. Instilling a greater sense of hierarchy amongst the people is also essential, rather than maintaining this facade of freedom for the retail clerk who knows his place is to serve. It is human nature for the lesser to follow the better, but there must be an interrelationship that is far more respectful than that we have today. The resentment of the peasant classes today, is to me quite frightening. You clearly do not spend much time in cities - but even here in New York, the last truly peaceful city in America, the underclass is extraordinarily unhappy and unmotivated to function in society as "service workers" or modern slaves.

There are many solutions, but what matters most is your fantasy is coming to an end. Not only do we already understand in many ways the biological origins of intelligence and the lack thereof, there is simply no more public will or money to continue to throw money down the well to your god. The day of reckoning is coming, and we can either let the whole country turn into Detroit, or we can acknowledge reality and adapt to it as best we can.

The first step is accepting what should be obvious to anyone who observes nature: intelligence is hereditary.

I was referring to Arthur Jensen's 1969 Harvard Educational Review article and Herrnstein's 1971 Atlantic article, "IQ" and his book, "IQ in the Meritocracy." I believe I understand their arguments quite well.

I would also point out that there is no single attribute that we can call "intelligence" and no generally accepted theory of intelligence, a difficulty that Jensen and Herrnstein get around by simply asserting that intelligence is what IQ tests measure. Jensen argues that academic success is a function of intelligence, but there are many factors that affect academic success, just as there are many intelligent people who have found themselves unstimulated by the school environment. Also the twin studies on which Jensen and Herrnstein rely range from flawed to fake. In a word, they have proved nothing about "intelligence" or heredity.

There is one key factor in young people's lives that is relevant here that is discussed much too little; that is the extent to which the education system is designed to reinforce and legitimize social inequality. Millions of young people's lives are shaped by institutions that undermine and distort their development rather than encourage and nourish it. We need to undertand this if we are assess young people fairly.

This systemic goal of reinforcing inequality is achieved in subtle and in unsubtle ways. Sending children to schools without textbooks or toilet paper or enough desks or enough teachers is an unsubtle way of telling children that they are not worth much and that they should not expect much in life. The bulk of education funding in the US is local property tax-based, so there are wide variations in the resources available to children in wealthy versus poorer districts. Also the US has the highest incidence of childhood poverty among the OECD nations, a fact as shameful as it is significant (Child Well-Being, Child Poverty and Child Policy in Modern Nations); children who are poorly nourished or in need of dental or medical care or are homeless or have no quiet place for study at home are often ill-prepared for success in school.

The belief that students are color- and class-coded for intelligence is a subtler way of reinforcing inequality, and these expectations can deeply affect the way a child is treated or how he feels about himself. These beliefs have been around for years, of course, but academics like Jensen and Herrnstein attempt to give them scientific credibility. Teachers can be trained to believe that his or her job is to find the differences in his students' intelligence and sort them out. This is, after all, what Herrnstein recommends when he calls for more rigid "tracking" of students, and this is what a great deal of state-based standardized testing is all about. The teacher can be trained to believe that, if he is doing his job properly, he will discover that his students' abilities range on a bell curve, and will feel subtle pressure to grade them accordingly.

Note the problem here. If a teacher succeeds in teaching and his students have succeeded in learning, some fourth grade math lesson well and he gives them a test based on the curriculum, their grades will tend to bunch up, for example as As and Bs. Their grades will not produce a bell curve. Has the teacher failed at his sorting job?

But now come so-called norm-referenced tests, which are designed to produce a bell curve (as are IQ tests, incidentally). All fifty states now require students to pass so-called high-stakes to get a diploma. These tests are norm-referenced; they are designed, in other words, to produce winners and losers, no matter how well students have learned their classroom material. (In a memo dated Nov. 1, 2001 the then superintendent of Boston schools informed teachers that, in the event their students performed better at their classroom work than they did in the state standardized tests [called MCAS], their classroom grade was to be adjusted downward to reflect the state tests. The tests take the fate of students out of the hands of teachers who know them and put their fate in the hands of testing company bureaucrats.)

There are many other ways in which children are told they are stupid and not worth much, or made to feel like failures, or have their self-confidence undermined. The fact is that our young people--whatever their race--have more intelligence and talent than the capitalist system can possibly use and higher aspirations than it can fulfill. To get them to accept their place in an increasingly unequal and undemocratic society, where they may well end up with a low-paying job or no job at all, it is important that their self-confidence be crushed and they be trained to blame themselves rather than the economic and social system for their fate.

I should point out that, at the heart of the education system, there is a conflict over its goals. The goal of the system, as I have said, is to reinforce inequality. The goal of teachers, parents, and students, however, is that students be educated to the fullest of their ability. This conflict lies at the heart of every conflict over educational policy and practice. Unfortunately most teachers, parents, and students are unaware of the real goals of the system, and so are weakened in this struggle. But to the extent that teachers or students succeed in a well-rounded edcation, they do so in spite of the system, not because of it. (For more on education policy, see my"You'll Never Be Good Enough: Schooling and Social Control")

To get back to I asked what policies you would recommmend based on your racialist theories of human "breeds." Your answer--to bring back an industrial economy and jobs--is quite disingenuous. Black people didn't somehow cause those millions of jobs to go missing; the jobs were outsourced or automated out of existence by the supposedly genetically superior industrialists acting in collusion with their government. Of course you don't explicitly blame black people for the disappearance of industrial jobs, but you do intimate that "the peasant classes" and their inferiority are somehow to blame for the major problems in our society, and somehow you seem to blame black people for the disaster of Detroit. You are simply carrying out one traditional role of racists: pointing the finger of blame away from the powerful who are responsible for social problems and direct the blame towards the victims.

Policy recommendations do emerge in Herrnstein's and Jensen's writings, and those of their associates like William Shockley. Jensen calls such programs as Headstart, designed to provide pre-school support for children of poor families, a failure and recommends that they be defunded. Herrnstein complains that "voluntary sterilization" of "inferior races" is "not a politically feasible solution," though you can tell where his heart is--with the eugenicists. (It is clear from your remarks elsewhere in this thread that mass sterilization is very much what you would see as a solution to all these "frightening...peasant classes.")

In fact the government for years has been pursuing policies very much in keeping with your and Herrnstein's theories. They've slashed social programs, eliminated millions of jobs, attacked K-12 education and are pricing higher education out of reach without going into debt peonage, and have created the greatest inequality in American society in history. You should be in hog heaven.

Your hysteria about crime is particularly interesting, given that "The nation's crime rate dropped 5% last year, continuing a 20-year trend that has cut the incidence of major crimes nearly in half, according to FBI statistics." (LATimes) Do you imagine yourself surrounded by uppitty black people? Do you want to teach them some manners? Put them in their place? I'll bet you do.

The real criminal classes are not to be found in our streets but in our board rooms and the halls of Congress and the White House. They're the ones who've made off with the loot. They're the ones who are bringing about the destruction of the lives of millions of ordinary Americans. And you talk about violence? Our rulers are war criminals who will stop at nothing to extend their power. They are the enemy.

As the situation in the country gets worse, I expect there will be more people like you spreading this filth. But you know what? Most people don't buy this crap. They understand who our real enemies are.

[c1ue]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Isn't it great that there exists some ethnicity out there that can still serve as the target for your own bigotry? Without rural white men in the south, who'd be left to go after?

If you prefer, I can substitute certain African Americans with their Egyptian Jets nonsense.

Note in both instances I am pointing out the absurdities of their beliefs, not their fundamental genetic inferiority.

But of course you seem to be more intent on attacking a person rather than understanding the argument.

That is effectively the average IQ for African Americans, which means half of them are legally incapable of making moral judgments

Provide proof of this assertion.

I'm not specifically advocating race being terribly relevant. It's only relevant in the US because there is a large difference between black and white intelligence.

Again your intellectual cowardice has failed to address what I put forth originally: that so called intelligence is most closely correlated with wealth, next with culture. Given that the African Americans are at the bottom tier in wealth, and had their culture destroyed by being imported as slaves, it is understandable why they are less educated.

However, to extend the reality of a lower level of education - both formal and informal - to fundamentally lower intelligence, now that's stupid.

1) there is a direct correlation between average IQ in a given geographic area and civilization as we know it. When the average IQ drops below 90, things become chaotic, anarchic, and unstable.

How about putting forth an example of a large geographic region, nation, ethnicity, etc etc where this has ever demonstrably occurred?

Pointing out a ghetto isn't going to illustrate your point any more than saying the rats who didn't leave the sinking ship are genetically stupider than the ones who did.

2) The central principle of philosophical liberalism that underlies Marxism, European "liberalism", libertarianism, capitalism, and all similar movements is that of the human nature being a product of socialization. This is incompatible with the realities of the world today.

Ongoing idiocy.

This is what's called: What I want is right because nothing else is realistic.

3) The dysgenic trend is magnified by the cognitive elite congregating in certain parts of the world.

Another example of your fundamental ignorance.

As I repeat yet again: genetics is so complicated precisely because of the vast unexpressed portion of the gene pool which lies within each and every one of us.

To ascribe intelligence - a vastly amorphous concept - to a dominant gene is to commit the same error as the 3 blind men with the elephant.

To then base a world view upon this fundamentally flawed concept...simply pathetic.

4) Superiority is irrelevant. What matters is survival. You seem to think the world will continue with several billion people with an IQ that is bordering on retardation. This will not happen. All your dreams and fantasies can't change the reality that hundreds of millions if not billions will die in your lifetime.

You just contradicted yourself bubba. Watch the film Idiocracy.

Poorer and stupider people by far procreate more than the so called intelligent, and by the law of survival are winning the war of survival.

But of course, your understanding of human genetics is quite primitive.

Geniuses can arise from anywhere and from anyone given the right conditions.

5) In the US, at least, we have the opportunity to return to reality. An industrial economy is a great first step. More disciplined education for those of lesser ability is a necessity. Things like corporeal punishment have to be reinstated. We no longer have the luxury of allowing white people the freedom to flee to the suburbs to escape the reality you find so horrid. With peak oil, we will have to return to cities and that means putting a stop to all the present problems that afflict them.

Sig Heil!

[Dave Stratman]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Education reform led by the Business Roundtable has been a key part of the ruling class strategy, first formulated in 1972, to go on the counteroffensive against labor and the "revolution of rising expectations" of the 1960s and early '70s. I see the bank bailouts, European austerity plans, and the current attack on Social Security and Medicare as part of that counteroffensive.

Some of you may be interested in this speech I gave some years ago (1997) to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents analyzing the business-led education refrorm movement. It anticipates many current developments.

SCHOOL REFORM AND THE ATTACK ON PUBLIC EDUCATION by David G. Stratman [newdemocracyworld.org] The following speech was delivered as the Keynote Address to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Summer Institute, 1997. The audience included about 275 school superintendents and assistant superintendents. ...I have two propositions I would like to put to you. The first is that the official education reform movement in Massachusetts and the nation is part of a decades-long corporate and government attack on public education and on our children. Its goal is: --not to increase educational attainment but to reduce it; --not to raise the hopes and expectations of our young people but to narrow them, stifle them, and crush them; --not to improve public education but to destroy it. My second proposition is that the education reform movement is part of a wider corporate and government plan to undermine democracy and strengthen corporate domination of our society. What evidence do I have for these assertions? Let's look first at the long-standing campaign to persuade the American people that public education has failed. This has been a disinformation campaign based on fraudulent claims, distortions, and outright lies. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, there have been numerous reports issued, each declaring U.S. public education a disaster, and each proposing "solutions" to our problems. The sponsors of the many reports are a little like the con-man in "The Music Man," who declares, "We've got trouble, right here in River City..." and the chorus repeats, "trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble..." He just happens to be selling the solution to all their troubles. How do you sell radical changes that would have been completely unacceptable to the public a decade or two ago? You tell people over and over that their institutions have failed, and that only the solutions you are peddling offer any way out of their "troubles." In the past couple of years, several excellent books have been published showing in detail that these claims are false. My purpose in this talk is not to cover the ground that these authors have already explored, but to answer the critical question: Why are the public schools under attack? But let's look just briefly at a couple of the key pieces of disinformation to which the American public has been subjected. The supposed dramatic decline of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores was a fraud. These scores did decline somewhat over the period 1963 to 1977. But the SAT is a voluntary test. It is not representative of anything, and it is useless as a measure of student performance or of the quality of the schools. The scores began to fall modestly when the range of young people going into college dramatically expanded in the mid-sixties. Did this mean that there was a lowering of student achievement during this period? Absolutely not. The Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, is a representative exam, given each year to sample student populations across the country. During the period in question, PSAT scores held absolutely steady. Even more notable is the fact that scores on the College Board Achievement Tests--which test students not on some vaguely-defined "aptitude," but on what they know of specific subjects--did not fall but rose slightly but consistently over the same period in which for the first time in the history of the United States or any other country, the sons and daughters of black and white working families were entering college in massive numbers. Berliner and Biddle comment in their book, The Manufactured Crisis, "the real evidence indicates that the myth of achievement decline is not only false-it is a hysterical fraud." How different would have been the public's understanding of what was happening in the schools if the media and the politicians had told the truth! How different if they had announced that, during the period of the greatest turmoil in American society since the Civil War, in which a higher proportion of young people were graduating high school and going on to college than ever before, at a rate unparalleled in any other country in the world, representative tests showed that overall aptitude and achievement were holding steady or increasing? How different would have been the history of these last decades for educators and parents and students-and for public education? What about the claim that U.S. business has lost its competitive edge because of the alleged failure of public education? Anyone who has been watching the triumphal progress of American corporations in the world market in the last two decades or has watched the unprecedented returns on the stock market knows that these claims are preposterous. Let me cite a few specific facts here: -U.S. workers are the most productive in the world. Workers in Japan and Germany are only 80% as productive; in France, 76% as productive; in the United Kingdom, 61% as productive. -America leads the world in the percentage of its college graduates who obtain degrees in science or engineering, and this percentage has been steadily rising since 1971. -Far from having a shortage of trained personnel, there is now in fact a glut of scientists and engineers in the U.S. The Boston Globe reported on 3/17/97 that , "At a time when overall unemployment has fallen to around 5%, high-level scientists have been experiencing double-digit unemployment." The government estimates that America will have a surplus of over 1 million scientists and engineers by 2010, even if the present rate of production does not increase. What explains the aggressive effort by corporate and government leaders to discredit public education? To understand this, I believe we have to look beyond education to developments in the economy and the wider society. In the past decades, millions of jobs have been shipped overseas. Millions more have been lost to "restructuring" and "downsizing." This trend is not likely to abate. The U. S. is presently enjoying its lowest official unemployment rate in decades-4.9%, or about 6.2 million unemployed at the peak of a long period of sustained growth. But even this large figure is deceptive, because it does not include the millions of people who have been reduced to temporary or part-time work, without benefits, without job security, and without hope of advancement. The number of "contingent" workers in 1993 was over 34 million. The future for employment is even more grim. Computerization will eliminate millions of jobs and deskill millions more. This is, after all, the attraction of automation for corporations: it downgrades the skills required of most jobs, and thereby makes employees cheaper and more easily expendable. I was talking recently with a chemist who works at a major hospital in Boston. She expressed dissatisfaction with her job. She said that, when she began the job ten years ago, she actually did chemistry. Now, she says, her job has been reduced to tending a machine which performs chemical analyses. A friend of mine wrote a book on the effect of computerization on work. She interviewed a vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank who was a Loan Officer at the bank. He sat there smartly in his three-piece suit and complained that "He doesn't really feel like a loan officer or a vice-president." Why? Because, after he gets the information from the person requesting a loan, he punches it into a computer-which then tells him if he can make the loan or not. The transformation of work through computers has really just begun. In his book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin estimates that "In the United States alone, in the years ahead more than 90 million jobs in a labor force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines." As Rifkin puts it, "Life as we know it is being altered in fundamental ways." Now, what does all this have to do with education? There were two little incidents which happened to me in 1976-77, when I was an Education Policy Fellow working in the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, D.C., which gave me a clue as to how to understand the attack on education. The first was a conversation with a man who was at the time a very highly-placed federal official in education. He put to a few of us this question. He said, "In the coming decade of high unemployment"-referring here to the 1980s-"in the coming decade of high unemployment, which is better? Is it better to have people with a lot of education and more personal flexibility, but with high expectations? Or is it better to have people with less education and less personal flexibility, and with lower expectations?" The answer was that it was better to have people with less education and lower expectations. The reasoning was very simple. If people's expectations are very high when the social reality of the jobs available is low, then there can be a great deal of anger and political turmoil. Better to lower their education and lower their expectations. A second clue involved a man whom many of you may know. Ron Gister, who was Executive Director of the Connecticut School Boards Association at the time, began a speech in 1977 with this simple question. He said, "Ask yourself, What would happen if the public schools really succeeded?" What if our high schools and universities were graduating millions of young people, all of whom had done well? In an economy with over 6 million unemployed by official count, in which millions more are underemployed or working part-time or in temporary jobs, in which many millions of jobs are being deskilled by computerization and many millions eliminated, and in which wages have fallen to 1958 levels, where would these successful graduates go? What would they do? If they had all graduated with As and Bs, they would have high expectations-expectations for satisfying jobs which would use their talents. Expectations for further education. Expectations about their right to participate in society and to have a real voice in its direction. I think you can see that, for the people at the very top of this society, who have been instrumental in shipping jobs overseas and restructuring the workforce and downsizing the corporations and shifting the tax burden from the rich onto middle-class and working Americans-the class of people, in short, who have been planning and reaping the benefits of the restructuring of American society-for this class of people at the top, for the schools to succeed would be very dangerous indeed. How much better that the schools not succeed, so that, when young people end up with a boring or low-paying or insecure job or no job at all, they say, "I have only myself to blame." How much better that they blame themselves instead of the economic system. The reason that public education is under attack is this: our young people have more talent and intelligence and ability than the corporate system can ever use, and higher dreams and aspirations than it can ever fulfill. To force young people to accept less fulfilling lives in a more unequal, less democratic society, the expectations and self-confidence of millions of them must be crushed. Their expectations must be downsized and their sense of themselves restructured to fit into the new corporate order, in which a relative few reap the rewards of corporate success-defined in terms of huge salaries and incredible stock options-and the many lead diminished lives of poverty and insecurity. If my analysis is correct, it means that you-public educators, every person in this room, and all the staff and colleagues you have worked with these many years-you are under attack not because you have failed -which is what the media and the politicians like to tell you. You are under attack because you have succeeded-in raising expectations which the corporate system cannot fulfill. They are also attacking education for a second reason: Blaming public education is a way of blaming ordinary people for the increasing inequality in society. It is a way of blaming ordinary people for the terrible things that are happening to them. The corporate leaders and their politician friends are saying that, if our society is becoming more unequal, if millions don't have adequate work or housing or health care, if we are imprisoning more of our population than any other country on earth, it is not because of our brutal and exploitative economic system and our atomized society and our disenfranchised population. No, they say, it is not our leaders or our system who are at fault. The fault lies with the people themselves, who could not make the grade, could not meet the standards. According to the corporate elite, the American people have been weighed in the balance, and they have been found wanting. Where does the education reform movement fit in this picture? My first experience with education reform came in September 1977, when I became Washington Director of the National PTA. It so happened that I began my job on the same day that Senators Daniel Moynihan and Robert Packwood and 51 co-sponsors filed the Tuition Tax Credit Act of 1977. The Tuition Tax Credit Act proposed giving the parents of children attending private schools a tax credit of up to $500 to cover tuition costs. The sponsors cited the SAT report as proof that the public schools were failing and that private schools needed support. Like many others in the public school community, I saw tuition tax credits as a real threat. I met with representatives of the NEA, the AFT, AASA, and others, and we formed the National Coalition for Public Education to oppose tuition tax credits. Over the next several months we organized a coalition comprising over 80 organizations with some 70 million members. The Tuition Tax Credit bill was a serious threat to public education. The entire federal budget for public elementary and secondary education at the time was about $13 billion. The Packwood-Moynihan bill would have taken about $6 billion from the public treasury. At the time, nearly 90% of our young people attended public schools. The Tuition Tax Credit Act proposed to give an amount equal to nearly half of all the federal moneys spent on the 90% of children in public school to the parents of the 10% of children attending private school. Aside from its budgetary impact, the bill would have meant a reversal of the federal role in education. The historic role of the federal government has been to equalize educational opportunity. Tuition tax credits, since they are a credit against income and go chiefly to upper-income parents, would disequalize educational opportunity. Federal funding of private education would have established and given official sanction to a two-class system of education, separate and unequal. The Tuition Tax Credit Act had enormous media and political support. It passed the House in May, 1978. We were able to stop it in the Senate only in August, 1978 with tremendous effort , and then by only one vote. Like the Tuition Tax Credit Act that started it all, the official education reforms such as school vouchers, charter schools, school choice, school-based management, raising "standards," the increased use of standardized testing, the focus on "School to Work," and other reforms, are calculated to make education more sharply stratified, more intensely competitive, and more unequal, and to lower the educational attainment of the great majority of young people. They are calculated also to fragment communities and undermine the web of social relationships which sustains society, and so to weaken people's political power in every area of life. Just look at some of the reforms: PRIVATIZATION AND FRAGMENTATION: Public schools have historically been at the center of neighborhood and community life in the United States. In addition, the schools have been a public good which relies on the whole community for support and in which the whole community participates. School vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, and school choice attack community connections among people. They attack the idea of a public good and replace it with the competition of isolated individuals competing to achieve their own private interests. In this way, privatizing education or establishing separate charter schools will dramatically undermine the power of ordinary people to affect the direction of society. Voucher and choice plans also legitimize greater inequality in America's schools, as students with better connections or more self-confidence choose better schools. Who can argue with tracking students into good schools or poor schools when the students themselves have apparently chosen their fate? School-based management is part of this trend. Though school-based management is usually touted as a way of "empowering" parents and teachers at the local level and of cutting back on the costs of central administration, its real purpose-aside from undermining the power of organized teachers--is to fragment school districts and communities, and further to disempower them. School-based management makes every school an island. It encourages people to think only about their own school and their own place within it. RAISING STANDARDS: There is a world of difference between raising our "expectations" for students and raising "standards." Raising our expectations means raising our belief in students' ability to succeed and insuring that all the resources are there to see that they do. Raising standards means erecting new hoops for them to jump through. For years Massachusetts has ranked just after Mississippi as the state with the greatest inequality among its school districts. Vast inequalities still remain among Massachusetts schools. Sharply raising standards while not equalizing resources at a common high level, and using "high stakes" tests as the engine of reform, is setting many thousands of children and many school districts up for failure. Establishing a statewide core curriculum and curriculum frameworks can be very useful steps toward educational quality and equity. My limited conversations with teachers who have seen these frameworks in various disciplines, however, lead me to think that they are being established at unrealistic levels that will assure massive student failure. INCREASING STANDARDIZED TESTING: The massive increase in standardized testing is exactly the wrong thing to do in our schools. At the very time when educators are calling for more "critical thinking" and "higher-order thinking skills," teaching is increasingly being driven by standardized, norm-referenced, multiple-choice tests. The effect will be to narrow the curriculum and push teachers into teaching techniques geared toward memorization and rote learning. With more focus on norm-referenced testing, the content of education disappears, to become simply the "rank" of the individual student. The effect is to attack the relationships among students and force them into greater competition with one another. Education is more than ever reduced to a game of winners and losers. LOWERING THE SCHOOL LEAVING AGE: Another thrust of such plans has been to encourage young people to leave school at an earlier age. In 1985 I was employed by the Minnesota Education Association to help design a strategy to defeat the reform plan proposed by the Minnesota Business Partnership. The Minnesota Business Partnership Plan was probably the most sophisticated education reform plan proposed in any state at the time. It proposed, among other things, moving from a K-12 to a K-10 system, and giving a "Certificate of Completion" to all students who successfully completed the tenth grade. Only a select group of students-projected to be about 20% -would then be invited back to complete grades 11 and 12. The clear effect would have been that a great many students would end their education at age 16. What was the sense of this proposal? The Business Partnership claimed that the plan was designed to allow students greater "personal flexibility" and "choice." In fact it had a quite different purpose. Minnesota at the time had the highest school retention rate in the country: fully 91% of Minnesota's young people were graduating from high school, and a high proportion of these were proceeding on to college. By encouraging tens of thousands of young people to leave school at age 16, the Business Partnership-comprising some of the largest Minnesota corporations, like 3M, ConAgra, and Honeywell-would have created huge new pools of cheap labor in Minnesota, to work in stock yards and assembly plants and flip hamburgers. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 does not have exactly the same proposal, but the Massachusetts law moves in a similar direction. In 1998 Massachusetts will require that all students pass a "high stakes" test in the tenth grade to be eligible to graduate. At the same time, the schools will begin offering students a "certificate of competence" upon successful completion of the tenth grade curriculum. What will be the effect of the "high stakes" test, especially if dramatic steps are not taken to insure that the educational programs offered young people in many poorer or urban districts are dramatically improved? I suspect that many thousands of young people who would otherwise be graduating with a high school diploma will leave school instead with a "certificate of competence" after the tenth grade. (Only 48% of Chicago's young people recently passed the new "high-stakes" test required for graduation.) I suggest to you that the effect of the high stakes 10th grade test will be to lower the school retention rate, and that it has the same purpose as the proposed Minnesota reform: to enlarge the pool of cheap labor, and to make it seem as if it is our young people and not our system that is failing. You may be aware that in 1995 for the first time in our history the gap between black and white high school completion rates was closed: 87% of black and of white young people between the ages of 25 and 29 have completed high school. Also, in the years from 1978 to 1993, the average SAT scores of black students rose 55 points. Are we now prepared to abandon these young people and undo this great progress? FOCUSING ON "SCHOOL TO WORK:" Beginning with A Nation At Risk, nearly all of the education reform plans have been couched in terms of one great national purpose: business competition. According to these plans, the great goal and measure of national and educational progress is how effectively U.S. corporations compete with Japanese and German corporations in the international marketplace. I think that most educators-most people, in fact-are downright uncomfortable with the idea that the fulfillment of our human potential is best measured by the Gross National Product or the progress of Microsoft or General Motors stock on the Big Board. In the 1950s, Charles Wilson, the former president of General Motors whom Eisenhower had appointed Secretary of Defense, declared, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." In the 1960s, however, millions of ordinary people became engaged in the civil rights and the anti-war movements and the rank-and-file labor movement. People began increasingly to question the role that the corporations play in American society and began to question the Gross National Product as the real goal and measure of democracy. Now come the corporate education reformers to tell us that the goal of human development is the success of Big Business! The education reform movement is trying to reassert the moral authority of business as the guiding light of human society and corporate profit as the measure of human achievement. On a more concrete level, the "School to Work" program aims to shape every child to meet the needs of the corporations. What kind of terrible power are we giving these corporations, what gods have they become, if now we should sacrifice our children to them? Let me hasten to point out that there is much that is being done in the name of reform that is good, and I am sure that each of you has programs in his own district which you could point to as education reform in the best sense. Education reform has two faces. The goals of the official "reformers" are destructive. Public education in the U. S., however, is a huge enterprise, involving millions of students and teachers and administrators. There is no way that this huge undertaking can be changed without the active involvement of tens of thousands of educators and others. These people-people like you and me and your teaching staff and other educators-do not share the goals of the corporations. Far from it: we genuinely want children and schools to succeed. So the effect of the massive involvement of educators at the grassroots has been, to one extent or another, to push reform in a more positive direction. In fact, I believe that the appointment of John Silber as Chairman of the Board of Education was precisely to put a stop to popular involvement in education reform. Silber's role is to put the genie of democratic education reform back in the bottle, so that the goals of the corporate reformers can be achieved. It is important to see that the attack on public education does not stem from a "right-wing fringe," as some writers have charged, but from the most powerful corporate and government interests in American society. Business groups at the national level and in most states have led the call for vouchers and charter schools and new standards. President Clinton himself has made Charter Schools the focus of his efforts in K-12 education, and has made tuition tax credits the focus of new aid for higher education. The assault on public education is part of a wider strategy to strengthen corporate domination of American society. In the 'sixties and early 'seventies, at the time education was being greatly expanded, we experienced a "revolution of rising expectations," as people's ideas of what their lives should be like greatly expanded. These rising expectations threatened the freedom of elites in the U.S. and around to the world to control their societies. Beginning around 1972, both capitalist and communist elites undertook a counteroffensive, to lower expectations and to tighten their control. This counteroffensive took many different forms, all designed to undermine the economic and psychological security of ordinary people. For example, the export of jobs and restructuring of corporations which have left many millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed did not happen by chance. They are government policies. Corporations were given tax incentives to move their operations overseas. The huge debts incurred in corporate buyouts were made tax deductible. The safety net of social programs instituted during the New Deal and Great Society was dismantled. The gutting of these social programs was not a matter of fiscal necessity, as we were told, but of social control. David Stockman, while Budget Director for President Reagan, boasted that the Administration, by slashing taxes on corporations and the rich while vastly increasing military expenditures, had created a "strategic deficit" precisely in order to dismantle social programs. Why? Because programs such as food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children and unemployment insurance make people less vulnerable to the power of the corporations. A succession of presidents, Republican and Democrat, has continued to cut the social safety net, to make people more frightened and controllable. The current supposed "crisis" in Social Security is a case in point. There is nothing wrong with the Social Security system that a few adjustments-such as removing the upper limit on salaries that are taxed- could not fix. Yet the government and corporations have mounted a scare campaign similar to the attack on public education to suggest that the Social Security system is near collapse and cannot survive without radical "reform," such as privatization. The goal is to make people feel insecure and vulnerable. What changes are needed in public education? We know that public education has important problems. We do not claim that the schools are not in need of change. The problem, however, is that the changes being proposed move in the wrong direction. They exacerbate the worst thing about the public schools: their tendency to reinforce the inequality of American society. At the heart of the public education system, there is a conflict over what goals it should pursue. On one side stand educators and parents and students, who wish to see students educated to the fullest of their ability. On the other side stand the corporate and government elite, the masters of great wealth and power. Their goal is not that students be educated to their fullest potential, but that students be sorted out and persuaded to accept their lot in life, whether it be the executive suite or the unemployment line, as fitting and just. The goal of this powerful elite for the public schools is that inequality in society be legitimized and their hold on power reinforced. This conflict is never acknowledged openly, and yet it finds its way into every debate over school funding and educational policy and practice, and every debate over education reform. A key question for us is, "What are we educating our students for?" The choices, I think, come down to two. We can prepare students for unrewarding jobs in an increasingly unequal society, or we can prepare our young people to understand their world and to change it. The first is education to meet the needs of the corporate economy. The second is education for democracy. The goal of the schools must be education for democracy. With this goal we would substitute high expectations for low, cooperation and equality for competition and hierarchy, and real commitment to our children for cynical manipulation. With the goal of education for democracy I believe we could build a reform movement that would truly answer the needs of our children and truly fulfill the goals that led us to become educators. There is no time for me here to outline a program of positive education reforms, although I have listed ten possible principles of reform on a separate sheet. Let me say in general, however, that the process of formulating positive reforms should begin with a far-reaching dialogue at the local and state levels, involving administrators, teachers, parents, and students, about the goals of education. This dialogue should examine present educational policy and practice to find what things contribute to self-confidence and growth and healthy connections among young people, and strengthen the relationships of schools to communities, and what things attack this self-confidence and growth and undermine these relationships. A similar dialogue should be organized in every community and at every school. It might include public hearings, at which parents and teachers and others are encouraged to state their views on appropriate goals for education, and to identify those things in their local school which support or retard these goals. Superintendents would have to be both leaders and careful listeners at such hearings. What conclusions can we draw from this analysis? I suggest several: One is that you as educators are under attack not because you have failed, but because you have succeeded. A second is that you did not make a mistake, five or ten or twenty-five years ago, when you became an educator. The work you have been doing for all these years has made a tremendous contribution to our society, and you should be proud of it. A third is that your job now is more important than ever, because you have a mission. Your mission is to play a leading role defending public education and forthrightly leading change for the better. Your role is to help lead the fight for education for democracy. The theme of your Summer Institute is "Building Stable Institutions in an Unstable World." The key to building stability in our public schools is threefold: understanding why they are under attack, understanding what is of value in them, and forging a direction for change. What can we do, as superintendents and educators? I have a few suggestions: 1. M.A.S.S. should prepare superintendents to play a leading role in reversing the attack on public education, by establishing a standing committee responsible for planning a long-term, serious campaign; preparing a range of literature and other materials for use at the local level; and holding training and strategy sessions. The literature should explain the attack on public education: why it is happening, the role that the official education reforms play in this attack, and call for positive reforms. M.A.S.S. should organize discussions, perhaps using the Superintendents' Round-tables or some other vehicle, for superintendents to compare their own experiences dealing with these issues. 2. The most important thing to do is to reach out to the community with information explaining the attack on public education. We should remember that the community begins with us--that is, with all the many people involved in public education: teachers, administrators, parents and students. If we can educate and mobilize this great community force, we can achieve a great deal. 3. We should, through dialogue with other educators and with parents and students, develop positive education reforms consistent with achieving education for democracy. 4. We should create local and statewide coalitions to expose the attack on public education and to change the direction of reform toward education for democracy. We should use Massachusetts as the base for a national movement for education for democracy. We are called to a great purpose. We are called to build a movement capable of defending our institutions from corporate attack and capable too of transforming them, to lead them in a more democratic direction. We must build a movement to take back America from the corporate powers and the masters of great wealth, to place our country truly in the hands of the people. We will not be alone in this battle. The great majority of people in our schools and in our communities share the same fundamental beliefs about what our schools should be like and what our society should be like. We can build upon shared values of commitment to each other and to future generations, and shared belief in democracy. For most of the twentieth century, the people of the world have been trapped between capitalism and communism. Neither of these systems is democratic. Neither has held much promise for most people. Now communism has collapsed. I believe our task as we approach the end of the twentieth century is to create human society anew on a truly democratic basis, in which human beings are not reshaped and restructured to fit the needs of the economy, but rather social and economic structures are reshaped to allow the fulfillment of our full potential as human beings. Thank you. David Stratman was the Director of Governmental Relations of the National PTA from 1977-79, and directed the National Coalition for Public Education in its defeat of the Tuition Tax Credit Act in 1978. He works now as a consultant to education organizations and school districts. David G. Stratman 20 Moraine Street Boston, MA 02130 (617)524-4073 Back

[FRED]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

What is that supposed to mean? Do you like the fact that 2 + 2 = 4?




And your point is? This is not a question of comparison, it is a question of ability and scientific . The Supreme Court has recently ruled that you cannot execute a person with an IQ less than 80. That is effectively the average IQ for African Americans, which means half of them are legally incapable of making moral judgments. Now, as I said in another post, in China, the average is 107, and with a bell curve distribution that means far fewer people are effectively retarded. Which society would you rather live in? One where half the people don't know right from wrong, or the one where 15% of the population is so burdened?




I'm not specifically advocating race being terribly relevant. It's only relevant in the US because there is a large difference between black and white intelligence. There are of course large variations in population groups, and in countries without this racial divide it is much more easily accepted as fact - i.e. Asia. Further, liberals (i.e. those who believe in the tabula rasa theory of human nature) persist in MAKING race a major factor in American politics.

People like yourself are obsessed with finding racists under every rock. Every failure of the black community continues to be blamed on racists. There are presently, daily, apalling and vicious racist attacks by black people against others of every other race, yet it is never reported as such on the news.

But meanwhile, the black community is, as I said, literally falling apart. Things are far worse than they were prior to the civil rights "movement".




Again, what is your point? The issue is not the existence of people of variable ability, but the relative quantity.



Again, the issue is public policy is not presently oriented towards your individualistic way of thinking, not that I think that would be a good thing. If you would like to make an effort to ban all racial quotas and all governmental decisions based in any way on race, then by all means do so. But that is not the world in which we live today.



No, it wouldn't, because those particular attributes are in fact not associated with general intelligence. Like many liberals, you seem to think this is somehow new information. While you may wish it was illegal to research intelligence, there are literally thousands upon thousands of studies. There is no longer any debate on the matter, this is one of the most studied aspects of humanity.



You really don't know what a Bell Curve is do you?

The useful action we can take, as I said, is to stop this fantasy that the government can change human biology. Not only do we spend far too much money attempting to fight nature, the charge of racism has been wielded with ever increasing frequency every time the evidence comes in the government has failed.

The primary effect of low intelligence seems to be limited ability to delay gratification, control impulses, and plan for the future. Those with an IQ below 90 absolutely require external moral guidance in most matters of life. "Freedom" is irrelevant to them because they cannot exercise it effectively.



Ashkenazi Jews are already at the top of the present economy, and I would say it is in no small part to their very high average intelligence. Had you read the Bell Curve, you would note that 1) one of the authors is an Ashkenazi Jew and 2) the matter is discussed quite frequently.

A major point I am trying to make is the most intelligent always rule. It doesn't matter what system of society you have, that is the natural order of human society.

The key points are as follows:

1) there is a direct correlation between average IQ in a given geographic area and civilization as we know it. When the average IQ drops below 90, things become chaotic, anarchic, and unstable.
2) The central principle of philosophical liberalism that underlies Marxism, European "liberalism", libertarianism, capitalism, and all similar movements is that of the human nature being a product of socialization. This is incompatible with the realities of the world today.
3) The dysgenic trend is magnified by the cognitive elite congregating in certain parts of the world.
4) Superiority is irrelevant. What matters is survival. You seem to think the world will continue with several billion people with an IQ that is bordering on retardation. This will not happen. All your dreams and fantasies can't change the reality that hundreds of millions if not billions will die in your lifetime.
5) In the US, at least, we have the opportunity to return to reality. An industrial economy is a great first step. More disciplined education for those of lesser ability is a necessity. Things like corporeal punishment have to be reinstated. We no longer have the luxury of allowing white people the freedom to flee to the suburbs to escape the reality you find so horrid. With peak oil, we will have to return to cities and that means putting a stop to all the present problems that afflict them.

As for me? I don't think there is any hope for the US. There are too many people like yourself who just won't be able to accept reality when it slaps you in the face. I'm hopeful I can move to the Far East. I'd rather live with Chinese than deluded white people any day.

User Serge_Tomiko has been banned for one week for this post. Reasons:

1. Failure to comply with administration requests to follow forum rules.
2. Failure to show due respect for fellow iTulip members.
3. Persistent pattern of prejudicial assertions that are offensive to members.

[dcarrigg]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Allow me to turn this question around on you Serge. Have you lived outside of your urban, multi-cultural area? Have you spent any time in the overwhelmingly White rural areas of North Georgia? Because I have. And I can assure you that if you spent much time around some of these people, you would quickly lose your ideas of any superiority of White IQ. Dumb is dumb, with plenty to go around.

That is one place I agree with you. The US is sinking fast in terms of intelligence. And this pretty much assures it's destruction as we know it. But it won't be because of one particular group. It will be because we have a system that protects the stupid and encourages them to continue reproducing with no negative consequences. In the past being stupid would get you killed. Victorian servants often required the permission of their employers to get married. In Elizabethan times, its amazing how many laws were enforced that severely punished people for irresponsible behavior. Rule #1 was that you didn't have children out of wedlock or that you could not take care of. The state rightly saw this as a potential burden on them and would severely punish anything that would lead to this. You could be branded for begging. There were a lot of reasons NOT to be dumb. Of course today its seen as a badge of honor for some. ( see British soccer, Jackass TV show, etc)

I find that people are usually not as smart as they think they are, nor are people as dumb as they may appear to be.

First of all, if one is going to go down this foolish intelligence quotient (IQ) as a measure of productive capacity road, then one must distinguish between individual IQ and average IQ. The current average IQ of a group - racial or otherwise - does not dictate the upper-bounds of an individual's IQ in said group.

I'd go out on a limb and guess that the average IQ of Greenwich, CT is higher than the average IQ of Detroit, MI. In saying this, I would be taking into account the quality of the educational system, the means of the people involved to hire tutors and have the best books, computers and learning materials, etc. etc.

To go at flintlock's argument:

The US is actually gaining in terms of intelligence if you want to use average IQ as a measure. In fact - so is the vast majority of the rest of the world.



In fact, this tends to exhibit itself among the living generational gaps:



There are real studies done on racial disparity in average IQ and average IQ over time - about 0.1 points per year overall. In fact these studies seem to indicate the dismantling of a meritocracy - meaning that as average IQ has risen overall since the 1940s, the IQ gap between the upper-class third and lower-class third of citizens has actually decreased. This may be further proof that luck becomes more important than just smarts in the age of financialization (even though hard work certainly may be a deciding difference).



Any racial average IQ gap is completely accounted for by environmental factors, if one chooses to include them. Of course, this is a correlation vs. causation argument - are people poor because they have a lower average IQ, or do they have lower average IQs because they are poor.

The long story short is that African-Americans have had an average IQ that is increasing faster than the overall rate of average IQ increase in the country for the last 60 years. Things are evening out - if slowly.

As for the environmental gap one must posit to
explain the Black-White IQ gap, IQ gains over time pull this
out of the stratosphere and down to earth. It appears that
Blacks have enjoyed a slightly higher rate of gain on
Wechsler-type tests than Whites (Herrnstein & Murray,
1994, pp. 277, 289). This implies that since 1945, Blacks
have gained at an average rate of over 0.30 points per year
and have gained a total of 16 points over 50 years (Flynn,
in press-b). Therefore, the Blacks of 1995 should have
matched the mean IQ of the Whites of 1945. Therefore, an
environmental explanation of the racial IQ gap need only
posit this: that the average environment for Blacks in 1995
matches the quality of the average environment for Whites
in 1945. I do not find that implausible.

Fred, thank you for keeping nonsense to a minimum.

And for C1ue - as a resident German speaker - and it pains me to do this - It's Sieg (German for Victory), not sig (Swedish pronoun).

[flintlock]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Greater wealth and more modern technology= increases means to wage war and destroy on a large scale.

Europe was too piss poor and backward to wage war on a large scale bewteen the end of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages

True. I know many wars during the late middle ages ended only because the money ran out to finance them. They'd just fizzle out. Kings were constantly asking for higher taxes so they could start another war. It was the push back from the taxpayers that kept a lid on things. With today's fiat currency, they can just make their own money to go to war with. Perhaps this is one reason the US is involved in at least three wars today.

[seanm123]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Andy Warhol was thought to only possess an IQ somewhere around 86 while Christopher Michael Langan one of the smartest men living works as a bar bouncer. I would think that all of us have an innate ability to make a lasting positive or negative contribution to this small world we live in for the so few years we are actually on it.

I do believe that we can always have an IQ test which will say that you are in fact brilliant regardless of your actual intelligence.

Remember we are all part cave man as well as part chimp. Humans and chimps can have anywhere between 95% - 98.5% genetic similarities depending on which study you read. Either way modern humans may have a single recent ancestor 10,000 or 200,000 years ago depending on whether you factor in a relationship with chimpanzees and to whether mutations or evolutions are considered. There really are so many permutations to consider, man, chimp, cave man, evolution and mutation. I even read somewhere that viruses can permanently alter our DNA. It really is an amazing thing DNA with such a complexities yet simple representation by just some letters in a sequence.

I would think sometimes we are related to the chimp much more than we realize. I for one will not act like one even if I innately can. I would suggest acting like a chimp won't make you too many friends or expand your scope of influence in online
forums and blogs. Perhaps in Hollywood but not here, but feel free to do so until I gather FRED says you cannot anymore.

[flintlock]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Well I wasn't really making any argument. But if you accept academic studies on IQ as being flawless, ( I don't) perhaps the rise in IQ is being offset by the population's unwillingness to apply it effectively?

By the way , a quick glance at your charts shows no mention of the US, and at least the top third and middle third IQ scores DECREASED over time. And surely you understand that tests of these types have a margin of error, so I'm not sure how this conflicts with my assertion that IQ is probably decreasing in the US. I wasn't saying definitively it is or isn't, only it appears that way to me. A few points difference one way or another on some chart is not overwhelming evidence either way. If US IQ is in fact decreasing, does that bother you in some way? If so why? I seriously doubt it matters one way or another. People get out of life what they put into it. One or two IQ points are not going to make any difference.

See my other post for my opinion on so called "intelligence".
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...02589#poststop

[dcarrigg]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

Well I wasn't really making any argument.

Fair enough - I'm just not convinced we're getting dumber. (this was the dumbest emotion I could find).

But if you accept academic studies on IQ as being flawless, ( I don't)

I'm absolutely with you there. It's a foolish measure of intelligence. I have a dyslexic friend with a master's degree. He's much smarter than me in many ways, but scores about 80 on those silly tests. Talk to him and you'd never know it.

perhaps the rise in IQ is being offset by the population's unwillingness to apply it effectively.

I don't know...maybe intelligence and common sense are two different things. Even so, I find it funny that people look back on the past as both a time of innocence and a time when people were smarter. I think that those two might be inversely proportional - or did I miss the point of the book of Genesis?

See my other post for my opinion on so called "intelligence".
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...02589#poststop

Fair point - I'm in agreement here.

[DSpencer]

Re: We're all part Cave-Man (Neanderthal) except for the Africans

But now come so-called norm-referenced tests, which are designed to produce a bell curve (as are IQ tests, incidentally).

My comments are mostly about grading on a curve in general, not necessarily the state mandated tests.

I am not sure I agree with your reasoning behind why these are used. I think it might just be laziness and a way for teachers to seem never too harsh at grading or too lenient, but always "just right". Either way it's a ridiculous testing method.

It basically removes all objectivity from testing. You could do a completely horrible job of teaching and your kids might learn next to nothing, but some would still have an "A" in that subject. In the real world however, it doesn't work that way. It would be like giving me and a bunch of random people a medical school exam. Maybe since I work in a hospital I could do X% better than avg person that knows almost nothing about medicine. Then giving me a medical license and sending me in to do surgery because I "aced" the material in a relative sense. Sure wouldn't want to be that patient.

I have to laugh thinking back to college. My econ professors were particularly fond of grading on a curve and some even used the method of stating up front that X number would get A's, X number would get B's and so on. The grading was completely relative to the rest of the class' performance. And people wonder "how did so many economists get this wrong?!"