Name: Real education
ISBN: 9780307405388

Real education

With four simple truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America's educational establishment. Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America's educational system does its best to ignore it.Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math. Real Education reviews what we know about the limits of what schools can do and the results of four decades of policies that require schools to divert huge resources to unattainable goals. Too many people are going to college. Almost everyone should get training beyond high school, but the number of students who want, need, or can profit from four years of residential education at the college level is a fraction of the number of young people who are struggling to get a degree. We have set up a standard known as the BA, stripped it of its traditional content, and made it an artificial job qualification. Then we stigmatize everyone who doesn't get one. For most of America's young people, today's college system is a punishing anachronism.America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. An elite already runs the country, whether we like it or not.

What Hacker News says

BostonianOct 2021

No, because as Charles Murray has explained in the book "Real Education" and in an essay "Intelligence and College" https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Murray%20Inte... , you should have an IQ of 115 to study at the college level.

thread

BostonianJun 2021

Education is a multiplier of IQ, not an equalizer. Many people, although policymakers won't admit it, don't have the IQ to study at the high school level, for example learning algebra. Even more people don't have the IQ to study at the college level, for example studying calculus and writing a coherent, footnoted term paper. And only a small fraction of the population has the IQ to do significant research and earn a PhD. Charles Murray has discussed the IQ prerequisites of educational levels in his book Real Education.

The article says, "In the U.S., the big achievement gaps across lines of race or social class open up very early, before kindergarten, rather than during college."

Race and class differentials on IQ tests have been well documented but are in Paul Graham's category of What You Can't Say.

thread

mcguireJul 2019

Charles Murray, author of

* Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

* Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980

* Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality

* Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010

Oh, and The Bell Jar, although that doesn't somehow imply that 1950 was the peak of White Culture.

thread