Is some people unsmart?

Disclaimer: I don’t profess to be an expert on education. I know that there are some readers of BFS who are. Feel free to critique my opinions vigorously, but please be kind. I’m just a guy trying to keep his blog from becoming irrelevant. Some of these local bloggers are posting several times a day and I just can’t keep up.

As a society, we tend to lament children who do poorly in school because of their wasted potential. A student who struggles to achieve Cs or settles into a pattern of doing D work is said to be the product of one of many factors: a lack of effort on their part, a lack of involvement from their parent(s), unqualified teachers, under-funded schools, mercury in the drinking water, Pepsi in the vending machines. A recent three-part article in the Wall Street Journal suggests another possibility, however, one that most of us would be uncomfortable in accepting – perhaps the D student simply lacks the intellect to do any better.

It’s easy to reject this theory at hand because it seems to unfairly denigrate a certain segment of the population. And, of course, we’ve all heard stories about how a very gifted teacher, who will later be portrayed on screen by Edward James Olmos or Ashley Judd, has been able to transform a classroom of half-witted layabouts into standardized-test-taking whizzes. So the problem, we presume, isn’t with the children, it’s with society.

But maybe the author of the article, Charles Murray, is on to something. His theory isn’t based on empirical data; he has science to back it up. It involves the general intelligence factor, which is said to be a widely accepted but controversial construct used in the field of psychology. I’m not smart enough to completely understand the precepts behind the construct, I blame my Kindergarten teacher Ms. Blackburn for that, but it’s related to intelligence quotients.

I’m sure there are plenty of researchers chomping at the bit to debunk the author’s conclusions, perhaps some already have, but in the interest of being progressive thinkers open to the challenge of considering unconventional and uncomfortable theories, let’s assume for the moment that some people just don’t have the intellect to perform at the level we think they should at school. What would this mean?

Well, for one, it would mean that No Child Left Behind is futile, something that a lot of people already feel, but for different reasons. But it would also mean that our entire education system is inadequate. Instead of educating children in groups based on age, they should be grouped by cognitive ability. This way, kids with less ability wouldn’t constantly be meeting with failure and those with greater ability would be continually challenged. It seems cruel to segregate children based on intelligence, but it also seems cruel to require kids to perform at a level that they aren’t capable of attaining.

One of the points the author makes in the article is that far too many people are attending college and far too many jobs require a college degree. This, perhaps more than anything else in the article, rang true to me.

Several years ago, the Illinois Department of Revenue made a four-year college degree a prerequisite for being hired as a Revenue Tax Specialist, those useful souls who answer our questions about the arcane system of taxation. But the degree didn’t have to be in finance or accounting, it could be in theology or physical therapy as well.

The department continues to train the specialists as they had in the past, teaching them everything they need to know, but they use the degree requirement as a screening process. The thinking goes, as it does in many organizations, that a person who puts it the commitment to earn a degree can generally be assumed to have a bit more going for them in terms of reliability and intellect than someone who ended their formal education after high school. And there is some truth to this, but only because so many kids today are told they must go to college if they want to get a good job.

But why should a person have to pay $40,000 for a degree that in no way aids them in doing the job they are eventually hired to do? There must be some less expensive way to find employees who possess both the analytical skills and work ethic to succeed in a job that they will be trained to do anyway, regardless of their educational background.

Back to the question of whether some people lack the intellect to do well in school, at least in its current structure, I think that there must be some truth to it. Most of us have no problem admitting that people such as Stephen Hawking are a lot smarter then we are. And even if we’re too humble to say it aloud, we believe that some people just don’t measure up to our own impressive intellect. So why is it so taboo to suggest that the reason Susie does better in school than Johnny is because Susie has a higher functioning brain?