Posted on 05/12/2009 4:04:03 PM PDT by GOPGuide
Middle-class children are more likely to be clever than those from poorer families because they have 'better genes', former Ofsted chief Chris Woodhead said yesterday.
The comments caused an immediate storm, with critics calling them insulting and 'crazy'.
However, Mr Woodhead won support in some quarters - including the backing of an evolutionary psychologist, who said research had shown there was a link between class and average IQ.
Mr Woodhead called for a return to selection by ability at 11.
He suggested that grammar school pupils were more likely to be middle-class because 'the genes are likely to be better if your parents are teachers, academics, lawyers, whatever, and the nurture is likely to be better'.
In an interview with the Guardian, he argued that Labour had betrayed a generation by refusing to accept that some children were not suited to formal secondary education
The Government had tried to make education 'accessible' rather than ' rigorous', he said.
Ministers should accept that some youngsters are simply born 'not very bright' and allow them to pursue practical training instead of forcing them into the classroom.
'I've taught, and I can still remember trying to interest children who had no interest whatsoever in English,' he said. 'They didn't want to be in the classroom.
'If I'm honest I didn't want them to be there either - because they were disruptive to children who did want to learn. What was the point?'
snip
However, there was support from Dr Bruce Charlton, an expert in evolutionary psychiatry from Newcastle University.
'Chris Woodhead is basically correct, and there's nothing new about it,' he said.
Dr Charlton insisted that intelligence was 'mostly inherited', adding that family background and education 'probably makes a small difference but nothing like as much as people think'.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
The truth hurts.
I’m sure this will only encourage even greater importation of masses of impoverished Pakistanis.
RACIST!
I don’t believe it. They just want to set the groundwork to abort more babies.
The only exception is Moslems who have an intermarriage problem.
And Shakespeare didn't write those plays either, the dirty commoner; had to be British nobility that wrote it on the sly.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
...well, I was intending to be classist as well.
Did it ever occur to anyone that it could it be that the people with the *better genes* were more likely to become middle or upper class?
...and then the upper-class kids have to go and spoil it.
The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be successful. And then, if you weren't born into a middle class or upper class family, you're children were. And you'll pass your genes on to them.
So over time, the genes that lead to higher intelligence become more concentrated among wealthier people.
It's not an absolute rule that applies in every case - but in general, it is true.
For a period of a few decades, England and Wales had an education system that selected children on the basis of academic intelligence and sent them to schools based on that test - Grammar Schools, Secondary Moderns, and Technical Schools. During that period, these schools created a significant amount of social mobility for many people. So it sped up the concentration process over a couple of generations. The system was more or less abandoned because it was very politically correct - but it had a real impact while it was in place.
Not only the education system, but hereditary aristocracy also allowed the upper classes to marry those with the best combination of genes.
Btw, doesn’t Germany have a similar education system to the old British system?
Germany does have a selective system, but one primarily based on teacher recommendation not on testing.
Germany does have a selective system, but one primarily based on teacher recommendation not on testing.
Good points.
Thomas Sowell gives a very good analysis of why intelligence is cultural rather than hereditary. If you are old enough (or have relatives old enough), I’m sure you’ve heard jokes about dumb Polish and Italian people. Why were those ethnic groups singled out? Because in standardized intelligence tests given around WW1, they had substandard IQs, not all that different than what’s found in the current underclass. By WW2, though, the IQs of people of Polish ancestry, for example, had become above average. Did their genes changes? Of course not. But their culture did. They’d become assimilated into American culture.
Similarly, Carribean blacks in the United States have incomes above the white average and often do quite well, even though their ancestry isn’t that different from the ancestry of American blacks. What’s different? They come from a culture that was more strongly influenced by British culture and tend to be more likely to be married and middle class. Further, I’ve even had a woman from a poor Jamaican family tell me that she did well in school in the Bronx because she didn’t want to be like the American blacks. Again, culture, not genes, is at work there.
The problem we have today is that the perpetual American underclasses have cultures hostile to formal education and the types of thinking that are critical to a high IQ score. Those cultures are what makes them lower class and what keeps them lower class. People who rise into the middle class develop a different culture, and their children benefit from it. The best way to get out of the underclass is to do what those Polish and Italian immigrants did a century ago, to realize that perhaps it’s too late for the adults but that their children shouldn’t follow in the footsteps of their parents but try to be better. They saved so that their children could go to college. They send their kids to American schools and, in some cases, even hit them if they didn’t speak English at home. That’s the way out. Multiculturalism is the trap that keeps people down. Drop that and race and “genes” won’t matter for today’s poor any more than they mattered for the white underclass of a century ago.
And, frankly, all the cheering of claims that IQ is based on race does is feed the perception that conservatives are racist. It’s not true. It’s not helpful. It hurts the cause.
Man, is this guy in trouble.
Guys got a point...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.