Delusions in Education

While most articles in The Economist are hard-nosed, recent education articles are an exception: they underwrite the Blank Slate belief (education is the only force that shapes children into adults) and they ignore now decades old insights by evolutionary psychology - see Pinker's "The Blank Slate/ The Modern Denial of Human Nature", 2003.

Here a thumbnail description. Cognitive skills (IQ) of adults have a bell-curve distribution. Children inherit iq-potential statistically from their parents; thus the effect of education efforts is limited by a child's potential.

Different races have different IQ bell-curves where the median can be to the left or to the right of a national bell-curve. States having different population mixes can have bell curves that differ from the national one. Each school recruiting children from a particular area will have a unique iq-potential bell-curve that is different from the national one.

The obvious consequence is that the yield of schools does not depend only on the quality of the education (the teachers), but is in essence limited by the iq-potential of the in-streaming children. While this conclusion is obvious, it has been, and is, systematically ignored by all stakeholders and pundits. It is way more fun to claim that every child is a potential genius than the realistic assessment that a school, given its recruitment area, no matter what educational resources, will produce below average results.

The article "California's schools/ From bad to worse" (TE 2010 April 3-9) is typical nonsense. It describes the terrible results, regurgitates all the standard funding statistics, quotes someone who blames school boards, teacher unions, classroom sizes, etc. etc. But it fails to take into account the academically dysfunctional population of California. It has about 10% illegal immigrants (most not having even finished elementary school) who's children have high drop out rates. Three percent of its population pays half of its income tax, while nation wide five percent pays half of the federal income tax. This all points to the sad observation that the iq-potential bell curve of California's children is worse than the national one and thus one should not be surprised that the California's school output ranks low in national comparisons. (Note that Silicon Valley is run by foreigners.)

Another article in the same issue, "Desegregation and schools/ No easy answers" regarding North Carolina, avoids also the hot potato of sub-groups having unfortunate iq-potential distributions. It describes experiments with bussing, rearranging school mixes based income (subsidized lunches), having schools with multiple short vacations instead of one long one, etc. But why these experiments fail remains un-analyzed.

The reason that the 2nd article avoids also an unfortunate iq-potential distribution of certain sub-groups is the explosive and horrendous further consequences. Combine inheritance of cognitive skills, including IQ, with the fact that the economic bottom half of the population procreates faster and more than the top half, then we reach the stupendous conclusion that a nation's bell-curve is slowly shifting to the left. This is not an esoteric inference and limited to the US. Great majorities in welfare states have become - over several generations - dependent on social services, to the point that they pay less in taxes than the value of the services they receive.

One cannot expect that politicians can now explain these unfortunate situations, but it would be quite welcome if publications like The Economist open up the discourse, for starters, on the real causes of why, after a century, we have suddenly failing schools.

This would prepare the way for the question how to regain majorities that do not depend on government social services and/or direct subsidies. Procreation at the expense of the society may ultimately become a topic to be pondered.