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| Re: OP-ED: What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success (896272) | |||
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Re: OP-ED: What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success |
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Posted by Concourse Express on Fri Jan 6 18:37:16 2012, in response to Re: OP-ED: What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success, posted by JayMan on Fri Jan 6 13:19:13 2012. I think Geoffrey Canada and his KIPP schools demonstrate that some folks are trying, as meager as their results are.Interesting that you mention KIPP schools; nice to see some effort... That won't do quite what you want it to, since part of the problem is exposure to low-IQ (and often violent) students itself. The gifted students need to be completed isolated from the low IQ rift-raft. You have a point, but what of those gifted students who either narrowly miss the mark (i.e. a few points below the cutoff of an admission exam) or choose not to attend the specialized middle schools (due to distance, etc.)? Remember that one of the problems our education system faces is a weak curriculum; even if the balance of students at the non-specialized schools have a lower average IQ than current, you'd still need something to challenge the brighter among them. Hence, my advocating these programs. (To further mitigate the violence problem, incorporate after-school programs or courses that'd separate the dismissal of most students from that of the gifted). Which brings me to this point, if your goal is having them live just like middle class Americans, then yes, they are up the creek. Look at sub-Saharan Africa. Look at Haiti. Look at Jamaica. American Blacks live considerably better than their brethren in these other countries. Which is a shame (the up the creek part), though I guess this must be accepted; even the Bible talks about the poor always being around (cf. John 12:8). Given this, the social programs become even more imperative (though something must be done about the rampant abuses...) One of the reasons lower IQ people tend to be more more careless in terms of sexual behavior is that they need to be more fecund to make up for their (in pre-modern times, anyway) much poorer survivability. Is sexual impulsivity still driven by a need to survive even now (at least in civilized societies)? One would think civility would lend itself to higher degrees of temperance on the average... ...speaking of temperance, since I brought it up and you brought up the need to separate high-IQ students from potentially violent ones, you might find the results of this study interesting. (I sure did.) In short, as you said, people with lower IQs tend to have lower self-control; indeed, they determined that there are neurobiological factors that can modulate self-control. Interestingly, there was also a wider temperance gap between female offenders and female nonoffenders versus male offenders/nonoffenders. Different ethnic groups (even in the same major race) can have fairly significant differences in personality traits. The Native Americans for example—despite having higher IQs than Black Americans—have a much lower economic standing because of these traits. Particularly, Natives have had less time to develop traits of those accustomed to civilization and have much less resistance to addiction, especially to alcohol. These personality traits can have a rather large impact on society and how it develops, as we are currently exploring. So let me see if I understand this correctly: individual and group traits contribute to the formation of various types of societies, which in turn determine the efficacy of said individuals and/or societies (especially when it comes to civilized societies); this, then, should explain why certain groups/societies with higher average IQs may not perform as well economically as those with slightly lower average IQs... my blog |
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