Hildegarde

I logged on to FB this morning to find that a number of people had posted links to this article

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9027846/The-rise-of-the-overclass.html

It’s a review of Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010

in a British newspaper called The Telegraph.

Some of you may remember Charles Murray.  A few decades ago, he wrote a book called The Bell Curve, with a colleague named Richard Hernstein.  That book posited that since intelligence is (demonstrably) at least 50% due to heredity, and since the genes for intelligence did not appear to be equally distributed by race, the chances were good that the percentage of each race found at each incremental level of intellectual ability would not be the same as their percentage in the population at large.

Unlike a lot of people who went yelling and screaming–he’s saying black people are stupid!–about this book, I actually bothered to read it, not once, but twice.

And I had some issues with the analysis M and H put forward.

But that’s not what I want to talk about here.

What I want to talk about here is this:  a number of people who did the yelling and screaming, and who declared M and H to be nothing but racist bastards for writing The Bell Curve, not only posted links to this Telegraph article, and seem to be indicating that they largely approve of the message of it.

Now, I haven’t read the new book–it isn’t even out yet–but on the basis of the review, it seems to be this:  intelligence is significantly hereditary, and in the world we live in now, smart people marry smart people.  They then produce smart children.  Those people have smart children. 

Smart people are better able to handle the advanced scientific, technological and literacy-based skills necessary to holding jobs and other positions at the very top of the academic and economic pyramid.

They are therefore becoming a “cognitive elite”–and a hereditary one at that, blocking off any chance anybody else has to rise in the social hierarchy.

Now, I’ve got a lot to say about this, but here’s the obvious thing:

1) You can’t have it both ways.  This is essentially the same message Murray was delivering in The Bell Curve, just starting at the other end of the problem.  You can’t call the man a racist son of a bitch for saying what he said in the first book and then hail him as a prophet for saying this.  One thesis assumes the other–the thesis of Coming Apart cannot be true unless the thesis of The Bell Curve is also true.

2) My guess is that when I read this, I’m going to have the same problems with the analysis that I had with The Bell Curve, largely having to do with the way he is defining “intelligent” and the way in which “intelligence” is in fact recognized as intelligence in this society at this time.

But looking past that sort of thing for a moment, and assuming we’re all on the same page when it comes to defining intelligence–which we’re probably not–may I please point out that the idea that there’s a “cognitive elite” is nothing new?

There has always been a cognitive elite.  Smarter people have always done better than less smart people, all things being equal.

But smarter people often do better than less smart people even when all things aren’t equal.  I went to Vassar because a woman whose name I share looked around a hellhole of a little fishing village on a remote Greek island, decided she wasn’t having any, and devised and carried out a plan to get the money to come to America.

Her parents were sending her brothers, but they wouldn’t send a girl.  Her parents sent her brothers steerage.  When she finally got on a boat with her own ticket, bought with money she’d made herself from a little business she’d started herself, she had a stateroom.

She was nineteen.

Of course, that story is about someone who was not just a smarter person, but had another whole set of qualities–and if I go off on that tangent someday, I’d say that the other qualities are, in fact, much more important than the intelligence. 

In the meantime, I would just like to say that life is not fair.  Some of us are born prettier, smarter, with better concentration or a natural sense of the underlying music–with things that are just better than other people get the shot at.

But this is not new, and recognizing it does not change anything about the world we live in.

What is new is

3) A social and economic sorting process that is increasingly, and increasingly monopolistically, located in the schools.

The number of ways that this is a really, really, really bad idea and ought to stop would take about forty volumes to list, but we should notice that the big problem with this is that it is not actually a system for sorting out who is more intelligent than whom.

It will do a certain amount of that, of course–but it will also exclude vast segments of the more-intelligent population who have other (and often valuable) traits that don’t fit well with schools.  That’s why there’s always a solid chunk of kids who have board scores near or at perfect and grades that in the toilet.

Of course there’s always the possibility that

4) As the world evolves, the level of intelligence, skill, talent and self discipline necessary to function in it even mininally will also rise, and a hunk of people at the bottom of those levels will no longer be able to get by at all. 

Or, to put it more bluntly, it may be the case that the level at which somebody would be deemed “mentally handicapped” would rise. 

In some ways, I think that we can say that that is demonstrably the case even now. 

In most ways, though, I think the fear is misdirected.

It’s certainly true that you need to be far more intelligent (and all the rest of that stuff) to be a general practictioner, never  mind a specialist, and that half the people admitted to med school in 1920 probably couldn’t get through the doors now.

But it is also the case that jobs at the other end that once required at least a minimum of skill (cashier, for instance) have been deliberately reconfigured in a way that means you need less and less intelligence and other skills to fill them. 

And day to day living operations–keeping your bank account sane, or banking at all, for instance–have been digitized to make it possible for people to function even if they’re barely literate or numerate at all.

There’s good money to be made in figuring out ways to accommodate people who otherwise couldn’t keep up.

But, of course, that isn’t Murray’s worry, and it isn’t the worry of the people who posted this article over and over again.  Their worry

5) is that we’ll come to a day when the genetics have rigidified, all the smart people will be married to other smart people and producing only smart children.  All the stupid people will be married to other stupid people.  We will forever afterward be living in a world of hereditary caste, where there will be no escape for the people on the bottom of the latter, because they’re all congenitally dumb and can produce only congenitally dumb children.

I have a whole set of objections to that scenario–in fact, I think it’s fundamentally ridiculous–but I should note that IF that was the case, if group X was really, actually, smarter and more skilled than group Y, and that intelligence and skill meant they could perform more important functions for society at large…then yes, that’s what ought to happen, and the only just outcome would be to let them be that cognitive elite.

But I’m not worried about that, because the fear is based on a profound misunderstanding of statistics.

Here, however, is what I’m worried about:

6) Beyond all the arguments about students and teachers, testing teachers, testing students, blah, blah, blah, there is the reality of life in some of our schools.

There is, for instance, the phenomenon of “service classes.”  A service class is a class a student can take for half credit, in which he or she does none of the academic work, but instead helps the teacher by fetching supplies, cleaning up the classroom, and doing other chores. 

The class and the grade appears on the transscript as “Algebra I” or “American History,” with no indication that the student has done no academic work whatsoever.

I first heard about this practice in an article by Jonathan Kozol, and I thought he was making it up.  In the years since, I’ve asked almost all my classes–and yes, the practice does exist, at the very least in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. 

It’s been outlawed, but it still exists.

It might explain why, in my class the other day, half the students didn’t know that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth of July, and could not tell  me what the American “war of independence” was about.

Let’s start worrying about this crap before we work ourselves up about a “cognitive elite” who are simply born smarter than those people over there.

And

6) I’m with Michael on two points–I don’t think testing teachers does much good, and I don’t think performance evaluations of anybody for anything are much other than a joke.

And I’d LOVE to dump all those “bogus education degrees” and bring in highly educated people with real degrees and pay them like real professionals.

But the reason that won’t happen  has nothing to do with evil, tight-fisted Republicans.

If we tried to make such a change, we’d have to fire better than 90% of ever public school teacher now working.

The vast majority of them are required to have those bogus education degrees to be allowed to teach at all.  Even candidates who start out with a “real” degree are usually forced to take a MAT (master of arts in teaching) or other education certification requirements before they’re allowed in a classroom.

And the teachers’ unions scream bloody hell at even the slightest deviation from their stranglehold over certification.

I’m not expecting it’s going to happen soon.