More on Murray

The piece I wrote yesterday about Charles Murray's new book focused primarily on his higher education-related arguments that only 10 percent of people have an IQ high enough to obtain the college degrees that 35 percent of people actually do attain. I didn't really have the space to tackle the first, K-12 half of the book, other than to note that "Murray believes that half of all children are more or less uneducable in the traditional sense and thus need to be identified as such via mandatory first grade I.Q. testing so they can be shunted off into vocational education programs for their own good. This is absurd and immoral, for reasons too numerous to recount here."

Ben Wildavsky does a good job of laying out some of those reasons in today's Wall Street Journal. For example:

International tests show that students in many other nations bypass American kids in reading and math. Could such comparative results really be a function of higher raw intelligence overseas -- or are they more likely to reflect superior educational practices? It is telling that hard-headed education reformers like Eric Hanushek, Chester E. Finn and Jay Greene believe that we can do much more to boost the academic achievement of children upon whom Mr. Murray would essentially give up.

And:

In his brave new world, the bell curve of abilities is cheerfully acknowledged; students and workers gladly accept their designated places in the pecking order; and happy, well-paid electricians and plumbers go about their business while their brainy brethren read Plato and prepare for the burdens of ruling the world. It is hard to believe that a dynamic, upwardly mobile society would emerge from such an arrangement, or "dignity" either. The view outlined in "Real Education" seems far from the one that Mr. Murray put forward in "Losing Ground" (1984). In that influential book, a headlong assault on the welfare state, he called for an "infinitely forgiving" education system in which students can try over and over to succeed, even if only some will.

Well said. I'd also note that Murray's preferred educational regime of IQ testing, tracking, and limiting opportunities for advanced degrees would invest a great deal of new power in government-run schools. That seems very un-conservative to me. And dangerous, given the way such power tends to refract through underlying social biases. Several years ago, I listened to the president of Dillard University, a historically black institution, give a speech about education. When he was in high school, the school tried to put him in the vocational track, because it didn't think he was smart enough for college-level work. They wanted him to be a repairman. He wanted something more.