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| Re: OP-ED: What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success (895569) | |||
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Re: OP-ED: What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success |
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Posted by JayMan on Thu Jan 5 09:50:59 2012, in response to Re: OP-ED: What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success, posted by Concourse Express on Wed Jan 4 23:56:21 2012. your commentary on human biodiversity is interesting, especially given its statistical nature (I have a thing for stats, as that's one of my favorite subjects to tutor).Well I'm certainly glad that you're willing to discuss the matter and see if we can shed light on the situation. God knows we need more of that in America (and somewhere beyond internet discussion forums and HBD blogs). While I'm having trouble accessing the Lynn article you linked at the moment Yes, sorry about that, I as yet haven't found a free link to that particular paper. The main point that Lynn makes about the PISA test is that scores on the PISA correlate about as well with scores on IQ tests (~0.85), about as well as IQ tests correlate with each other, and about as well as scores of one individual taking the same test multiple times correlate. In other words, the PISA is really an IQ test, and doesn't measure the effectiveness of education per se, but rather students' ability to learn. I must ask: wouldn't a situation where private schools "siphon" (potentially) higher scorers and higher achievers underscore the socioeconomic problem? As Lynn recites, this is what Arthur Jensen terms the sociologist's fallacy. Think of this: IQ is highly heritable (70%-80% so, especially in late life) and not really subject to environmental manipulation. As well, IQ has an impact on life achievement both academically and economically. As such, it necessarily follows that children coming from higher SES parents have higher average IQs than those from lower SES backgrounds, and those from wealthier backgrounds will perform better as a group. This is especially true in today's world that is awash in opportunities and people of all sort of backgrounds have a reasonably fair shot at succeeding. The earlier era of people ascending into the middle and upper classes was due to new opportunities being provided to people who previously lacked them, such as poor rural dwellers like Charles Murray who praised the SAT for identifying his talent and opening the door to better schools. However in the current generation, this process is now largely complete; the children of the higher classes remain in the higher classes because of their talents, and the children of the lower classes remain there because of their lack of talent. The main reason that we have far less social mobility in today's world isn't because we don't have a level playing field, but precisely because we do. As Jensen put it: CBGMT argue that the north–south differences in the PISA data are reduced “when one corrects for family and background variables” such as family incomes and school variables such as financial resources, teacher tenures, and tracking”. They conclude that “correcting for family and context background removes a sizable part of the postulated genetic differences between regional groups.” This correction for family background, SES, and other variables is known as “the sociologists' fallacy” identified some forty years ago by [Jensen, A. R. (1973). Educability and group differences. London: Methuen]. As Jensen observed “SES classification is more a result than a cause of IQ variance”. The fallacy of the method is that the SES, earnings, etc. of the family are themselves products of the families' IQs, which determine the IQs of the children.(emphasis added) Or put another way, if the financial barriers were removed here, as they were in Finland, would we see higher achievement amongst underperforming groups? So the short answer is no, as the failure of programs like Head Start demonstrate. In fact, as we see on the PISA charts, all racial groups in America do better than they do in their ancestral homelands (indeed, American Blacks average IQ is about 85, significantly better than the average African average IQ of 70). Handicapping them with watered-down curricula and a flurry of tests won't solve this problem - hell, we've discussed this before at length. Here's the secret and the piece of the puzzle that I think you're missing: education doesn't make you smarter, it only makes you more knowledgeable. Intelligence, particularly the g-factor (the meat of IQ tests) appears to be largely innate, and poorly affected by learning. Smarter students can learn more at a faster pace, hence, they have more hefty curricula. By contrast, less intelligent children learn more slowly and generally can only handle the "watered-down" curricula. This is why if you compare a middle school in the South Bronx to one in Helsinki, you'll notice a world of difference of what is taught and how quickly. I know ed. reform can't modulate students' IQ so differences will always exist, but I don't advocate doing nothing vis a vis education for people born in disadvantaged groups/SES. Unfortunately, this is one of the things where the wisdom of the "Serenity Prayer" comes in handy. Eliminating social inequality is impossible in a free, meritocratic society, as long as innate differences between people exist. They have not even eliminated it in Finland and the other European countries; it's just that they don't have the wild extremes that we do because of their homogenous (and high IQ) population. I am however one of the apparently rare liberal believers in HBD. I'm all for social welfare programs that help the underprivileged. However, they should have realistic expectations—just as none of the nations in sub-Saharan Africa will rise to First World standards in the foreseeable future, no matter what the developed world does for them, requiring us to accept that we in the developed world must resign ourselves to look after them, so we must we do for the underclasses in our own country. Indeed, one of the reasons it's so hard to get more progressive measures passed in the U.S. is because of its heterogeneous population, reducing the feelings of kinship Americans feel towards other Americans vis-a-vis Europeans. One thing we can do is enact immigration reform, we should make sure that people moving here will only be those capable of contributing to our society (i.e., high IQ) and shut off the flow of illegal Mexican and other Latino immigrants (who have a lower average IQ than the White population here). |
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