Because it’s been awhile since I ripped a bad argument to shreds, and I’m feeling the urge. If you want to see the source of this, it’s a link I pulled from my subscriptions page recently. I have a distant affection for the guy who posted it, despite, or perhaps partially because of, our civil but intense disagreement on a great many issues. (We also vehemently agree on many issues, such as this one.)
But I digress. Here’s a link to the screed he admired. Please read it before reading my response, if you want to form an opinion on your own.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009531
I’m less than impressed by the argument in this piece.
His claim is that schools inherently suck because they can’t make people “smarter”. The only definition he offers for smart is IQ. And then at the end he says IQ sucks.
Yes, IQ is something that’s pretty stable, that was one of the attributes the people designing the test were shooting for.
Only at the end does the author note that IQ has basically nothing to do with success outside school later in life. So saying that you’ll never change someone’s IQ, well, their misery in school will be different than mine, but I wouldn’t necessarily start bemoaning the terrible life they’ll have.
He associates lack of education with low IQ and terrible outcomes. He hypothesizes a causal relationship: (stupid people are always makin’ trouble.) That’s not at all the claim he spent most of the editorial discussing. In fact, it appears as the second to last sentence, and is utterly unsupported in the rest of the screed.
It seems like pretty lazy thinking to me.
IQ is stable. The goal of school is to make people smarter. Therefore school is a waste of time. But not really. Less educated people are the source of all the trouble. If school can’t affect smartness, then smartness must affect school time. Must be that they didn’t stick around because they weren’t smart. Realize this ultimate truth, and things will be better.
I disagree with his implicit goal for school. I disagree with his metric and his implicit definition of intelligence. I disagree with his fatalism.
Let’s start with intelligence. I rather like the definition of intelligence offered by Howard Gardener in Multiple Intelligences. (You’ll note the author dismisses it without describing it. That would mean paying attention enough to know what the hell he’s talking about. He’s clearly much too busy for that.) Gardener describes intelligence as the ability to produce something valued by a culture. That is to say, subsistence farmers probably won’t be impressed by my knowledge of theoretical chemistry or calculus (and not because it is shamefully scant, which it is.) any more than I’ll be impressed by their intimate familiarity with various kinds of dirt, bugs, and plants. (Okay, I’d be a little impressed, but it’d go over my head pretty damn quick.)
So this embeds intelligence as something dependent on culture, domain, and tools. Even assuming you were fluent in the native language of a pre-literate tribe, trying to impress them in their homeland with your computer saavy ain’t gonna get you far. Especially if you don’t have a computer. Unless you know how to hunt, gather, make tools, or the like, you’re probably not going to impress them with your intelligence. But this gets into the murky confluence of learned skill and inate aptitude.
Measuring intelligence is much trickier using this definition. You can’t sit someone down, have them take a test, and walk out with a number. This moves measuring intelligence into the realm of “I know it when I see it.” I think that’s a very fair criticism of the definition. To measure the intelligence, you have to measure the outcomes. Gardner may think I need to read more of his books, and I probably do. But I still think it’s a much more useful intelligence, or, rather, set of intelligences, than whatever it is that IQ measures.
Right, moving on to school. School is a brainwashing center to indoctrinate you into a particular culture, and secondarily teach you skills. School inculcates obedience, scheduling, silence, hand raising, line forming, the independence (or opposition) of the social from the intellectual, passive learning, the death of curiosity, and maintaining peaceful behavior with those who annoy you (or you’ll get detention.) You may or may not also pick up math, reading, social studies, science, and a few related topics. But you’ll get kicked out of school faster for not learning the first set of lessons than for not learning the second. Even dumb people can learn to shut up, do as they’re told (if they’re told simple things), and not hit anyone, unless they are seriously socially stupid.
And finally, his fatalism. My perhaps cynical, but I’ll claim highly accurate, depiction of school notwithstanding, I think school serves valuable purposes in maintaining and improving both social order and an individual’s lot in that social order. Schools perpetuate cultures. “Well behaved” students exhibit a kind of intelligence as defined above. (Whether the intelligence is in understanding and practicing the school rules, disobeying and concealing one’s disobedience, or a mixture of both is another question. I have no idea if Ferris Bueller knew jack or shit about algebra, but there’s no denying the boy was smart.) The entire mission of school is to teach at least one of two particular sorts of intelligence (rule following, or rule breaking without getting caught). And I would claim it generally succeeds.
I think what grates on you most is that his position conflicts with the pollyanna-esque notion of baseline equality between all people, and that just by trying and pushing more we can make people into what they cannot be. I don’t think the author dismisses ideas like multiple intelligence; I think he had a word limit like most other editorial pieces where you get your one or perhaps two points.
Read today’s piece.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009535
Sorry, I mis-pasted the 17th’s piece.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009541
After making the post, I had a hard time getting to sleep. Excitement or a guilty conscience, maybe. Dunno. Thanks for pointing those out. I did want to see the other two articles, but they weren’t linked directly, and I didn’t bother to hunt for them.
I really like the final one. I especially like his summation of the series:
That summation could not have improved my opinion of what he said more. The part I italicized is a profoundly important part of the first third. And a part I didn’t see in the original article. Perhaps due to skimming. Rereading it, there are a couple of paragraphs in the middle that a generous interpretation would say tie into what he’s saying. Having ripped him one, I’m inclined to be generous.
But, saying “some people are slow, they’ll never catch up,” and his repeated hammering on that point, and that we spend so much teaching them, and it’s not working, led me to the conclusion he wanted us to stop paying for it, and let them just sink in normal classes (‘cuz they sure ain’t swimmin’). That would be inhumane and wasteful.
As for the second article, I definitely see his point. I think it was shortly after I graduated high school, while working my first (really crappy) job, that I made noises about not going to college right away, maybe taking an extra year to figure things out. That went over like a lead balloon. And then, halfway through my sophomore year, I took a leave of absence. Heh. “Oops”. I was really disappointed with myself at the time, but that was me trying to measure up to an expectation that deep in my heart of hearts, I didn’t really care about.
That having been said, he’s still hung up on IQ, which I think sucks. I’m not saying that everyone can learn calculus, paint, or sing. (I’ve tried doing the latter two. I think I could learn to paint okay to good. I doubt I’d ever be a great singer.) I’m saying that he’s making way more out if than is reasonable or useful.
Another point that he only sort of addresses in article number 2, which I think deserves alot of attention is inclination. I was definitely “smart” enough to be a big computer nerd. And I’d be raking in the big bucks now, if I’d kept doing it or at least, if I’d been doing it well and stuck with it. But, to an amazing degree, considering I got 2 BS’s in the topic, I didn’t care about it. And now, for all my kvetching, I’m doing something I like alot more. Pays worse, benefits society more, I don’t vividly fantasize about quitting during my second week on the job. Following your “passion” is great & all. One certainly shouldn’t ignore it, nor let it lead one around by the nose.
longest. comment. ever. (not really, even though I had to split it in two)
Sometimes, I wonder where you get your impressions of me. Would I like it if everyone had well developed, multi-faceted intelligence, or at least the potential or such? Yeah. Did I frequently visit a home for down’s syndrome adults who were dumber than I was at 8? Yeah. (Mom was a shrink, and I hated taking the bus.) I knew they weren’t getting any smarter. They scared me a little, but I was the one who didn’t want to take the bus.
In high school, I tutored people on the fast track and the slow track for math class. Older than me, younger than me, though mostly people my age. All for the joy it brought me to help. I went to a top notch school for computery things where I went rapidly from head of the class to a bit past middle (with terrible fucking work habits). I later had a job at a community arts college tutoring math and science. I’ve seen people who break down complex problems and solve them while I’m still trying to understand the question, and I’ve seen people who break down at the difficulty of measuring things with rulers. And there were very mathematically bright people at that arts school who only needed to believe in themselves more. And there were not so bright people who believed in themselves too much (ya don’t see many people who were hyper-over-confident coming in to tutors, though.) I’ve seen alot of people thinking.
I also really liked Mercedes Lackey (her early stuff anyway). Not just for Vanyel. But she had a definite moral element in her writing. Alot of the writers I like are preachy. And a good many of them say great ability brings with it great responsibility. I think my habit of being self-effacing is two fold. 1) Being the braggart bright boy is a good way to isolate oneself socially, which fit my goals at 16 better than my goals at 30 (even if I didn’t exactly see things that way at 16) and 2) I hate disappointing people, and I’m not sure I’m up to the responsibility.
My impressions of you are formed through observation, conversation and first-hand experience. I recall a great deal about our conversations re: your youth and development. While I acknowledge it’s been some time since we’ve had in depth personal interactive contact, and it wasn’t my intent to offend you, I don’t think I was too far off.
It grates on me, too, to read him saying these things because that’s simply not the messaging I was raised with. When I read the first piece, then read it again, I thought I saw where he was trying to go and went trundling through their fairly poor search interface to find the second and third pieces to see if he brought it around… and I can’t disagree with his conclusions. I don’t expect much productive change to come about as a result of an editorial, but he’s correct that this should be discussed more openly even if it treads on the sacred cow of equality.
College in the US is extended wet nurse daycare, and it’s subsidized to an alarming degree. You go to your misc.school for 4+ years, you gather your 50-150k in subsidized debt in exchange for your membership card to the “people with a degree on their resume’ club”. You’re then released into the workforce and abandoned. If you have a brand name membership card, your alumni affiliations may help with connections but ultimately you’re likely to have little real work experience. His points about specialists needing college is valid. Vocational school being an excellent alternative that should be touted as equal to 4+ year college is absolutely spot on.
The constant focus on IQ is a little irritating but I don’t think he could have used any other widely understood measure of aptitude. He tries to characterize ‘g’ but it’s not something we can measure. If life was an RPG we could just click our character sheets… but alas, it’s not that obvious. 😉
There are so many problems with his article and supporting premises and following arguments that I don’t even know how to respond to it. I mean, I do, but it’s not worth the time to do so fully.
Take, for example, his headliner “Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.” Well, duh. Due to the very nature of mathematical averages, half will always be below average and the other half will be above. It’s somewhat of a strawman fallacy on my part to attack the aesthetics of one minor bit of his reasoning rather than the reasoning of his core arguments…but damn, that’s dumb.
What’s more, he takes intelligence, or “g”, to be a wholly endogenous variable–a variable that is on the left side of the equation, rather than the right. A variable that is *not* influenced from outside of the system (the “system” being the student, the individual). Contrarily, there are temporal/developmental exogenous factors that influence intelligence. What’s more, through time it is not a linear variable—there are tipping points, butterfly effects, and potential accellerations. Again, stupid.
One last point, not because there are no more points to make, but because it’s futile to critique something so unworthy of critiquing: He states, “Hardly anyone will admit it, but education’s role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated.” In this statement, he sloppily associates causality between “the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated” and “problems [in society].” Intelligence is sometimes correlated with the problems he mentions, like “(1)crime/drugs, (2) extramarital births, (3) unemployment”, but it is most often a confounding variable. For example, (1) socioeconomic status is more causally involved with crime/drugs than “intelligence”, (2) you don’t have to be an Einstein to learn about birth control/safe sex/the problems of raising a child too early in life (this is education that is very important to a societal problem but does not increase IQ–they don’t test about social consciousness and birth control on IQ tests), and (3) job skills are only weakly correlated with IQ, especially if we are talking about job skills relevant to the question of being employed versus not being employed at all (i.e. the level of skills required to work at McDonalds).
I can’t believe the WSJ published this. Seriously. Well, actually I can believe it, because it will grip readers via its controversial claims (by “controversial”, read “stupid”). Still, it seems unethical to publish such crap, since some people might actually take it to heart and mind.
ahhh, statistics
Actually, he doesn’t know his math. In fact, because the average means the mean, it’s quite possible that far more than half are below “average” so to speak. 🙂 Perhaps he himself is one of those children who should be left behind. Still, the patrician in me appreciates his fatalism towards dunces: Once an idiot, forever an idiot.
Re: ahhh, statistics
I made the median/mean point in a comment on the original post. =)
I thought the purpose of school was to educate people. Not make them smarter. People with lower IQs who work hard can be very well educated and sucessful. Just my two cents. (Granted after reading everyone else’s comments on this, that’s really ALL I’d value it. 🙂
Silly person. School is there to make you smarter. 😉