Black, intelligent, and feeling guilty about it
This is a disturbing article on a confusing topic: racial diversity in education for the academically gifted.
Hunter College High School is an elite public school in New York City, grades 7-12, that accepts students based on a test administered prior to entry (it also has a lower school that has an exam-based entry). It just so happens that the percentage of minority students at Hunter is small. One of them, Justin Hudson, spoke at the most recent graduation ceremonies, and said the following:
I feel guilty because I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do any of you. We received an outstanding education at no charge based solely on our performance on a test we took when we were 11-year-olds, or 4-year-olds. We received superior teachers and additional resources based on our status as ‘gifted,’ while kids who naturally needed those resources much more than us wallowed in the mire of a broken system.
And now, we stand on the precipice of our lives, in control of our lives, based purely and simply on luck and circumstance. If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.
Hudson is tapping into one of the huge and enormously heated controversies of our times, whether measured racial differences in intelligence are completely environmental or are the result at least partly of heredity. Let’s just say for the purposes of this post that we will not settle the question here; and that there’s a great deal of overlap among racial groups, all of which have plenty of highly intelligent members, many of whom (black, white, or whatever color) are not raised in an environment that allows them to take full advantage of whatever intellectual gifts they might possess (just take a look at the true story behind this movie if you don’t believe me).
I’m interested right now in other issues, such as what motivates a student such as Hudson to experience so much guilt that he feels the need to include this sentiment in a graduation speech, and to ignore the fact that he and other students at Hunter are not merely lucky, but have almost certainly worked long and hard to do the work there in order to graduate. My guess is that he has been exposed to a relentless barrage of PC thought that dictates that there are no innate differences—even between individuals—except for those of privilege and good fortune, and that achievement is a zero-sum game where his own advancement can only have been accomplished at the expense of others.
I was puzzled by the fact that Hudson was described in the article as a “graduation speaker.” I wondered what that meant, and why neither of the traditional terms “valedictorian” or “salutatorian” was used. So I did some research, and discovered that even Hunter has abandoned those concepts in favor of a different and less score-bound process:
To relieve some of the pressure on its students, the school does not name a valedictorian; instead, it invites seniors to submit proposed graduation speeches and a faculty committee selects one to be read. This year, it chose Mr. Hudson’s, to his surprise.
So we learn two things here: despite Hunter’s still being wedded to its old-fashioned admissions test, it has succumbed to the modern trend away from having the students with the highest and second-highest averages deliver the commencement speeches. That may relieve pressure on the students, but it also gives the faculty leeway to select whomever it pleases based on other criteria, which can include ethnic diversity—unless, of course, the speeches are submitted anonymously; but even then the content of Hudson’s speech would have been a possible clue to his racial identity.
The process reminds me somewhat of changes at the Harvard Law Review during the 70s that made it possible for students to be selected for the prestigious journal on the basis of a student vote on special writing samples rather than grades, and allowed the HLR president to be elected rather having the post go to the best student. The changes were explicitly designed to encourage the selection of minorities to the posts, and Barack Obama was one its beneficiaries.
It seems that the Hunter faculty may have used Hudson to deliver a message to the administration by proxy. They read his speech and knew its content before they selected him to give it. The test admission process had already become a bone of contention at Hunter, as its minority enrollment fell in recent years, and the disagreement breaks down as faculty vs. administration:
The events fanned a long-standing disagreement between much of the high school faculty and the administration of Hunter College over the use of a single, teacher-written test for admission to the school, which has grades 7 through 12. Faculty committees have recommended broadening the admissions process to include criteria like interviews, observations or portfolios of student work, in part to increase minority enrollment and blunt the impact of the professional test preparation undertaken by many prospective students.
Eliminating the test, which has remained essentially unchanged for decades, is not on the table, said John Rose, the dean for diversity at Hunter College. The test, he said, is an integral part of the success of the school…
It seems to boil down to an old-fashioned disagreement between liberal faculty and more conservative administration on the mission of the school. An interesting side question is what the explanation might be for the drop in minority enrollment since the 90s:
As has happened at other prestigious city high schools that use only a test for admission, the black and Hispanic population at Hunter has fallen in recent years. In 1995, the entering seventh-grade class was 12 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic, according to state data. This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial. The public school system as a whole is 70 percent black and Hispanic.
Interesting; the administration of an admissions test is a practice many decades old at Hunter, and certainly predated the year 1995. Why, then, has minority enrollment dropped so precipitously since then? I don’t know the answer, but I ask the question.
One possible explanation is related to the point Hudson made: apparently, the Hunter test may not have been well-publicized in schools in heavily black and Hispanic areas. Was there perhaps a fall-off in knowledge of the test’s existence in those communities in recent years?:
Until recently, individual schools in New York were responsible for making sure their kids knew about the test. Essentially, teachers had to know about the test, know about which students to recommend and connect them to the test through a very personally [sic] process. As a result, black and Latino children have often been left out of the pool of those selected to receive the opportunity to apply to Hunter College High School and receive an amazing education for free.
That problem was corrected this year when, “for the first time, the school this year sent mailings directly to all city fifth graders who scored in the top 10 percent on both the state English and math tests, the criteria to take the Hunter test, rather than relying on schools to pass the word. Hunter High also started a mentoring program for promising third graders. One-quarter of the city students qualifying for the test this year were black or Hispanic, according to an analysis by The New York Times.”
This seems like an excellent change, although it may take a few years for the full results to show up in the student body. But this sort of thing seems to be the way to approach the problem, rather than watering down the admissions criteria because of PC considerations, laying guilt trips on hardworking students, or using graduation speakers to channel the grievances of the faculty.
I think the NBA needs to temporarily lower the hoop down to seven feet when a white guy is shooting.
So why was he still there? If he really believed that, he should have left the program in favor of one of the unfortunates he believes needed the resources more than he.
Anyone with a scintilla of sense, following the Pareto principle, directs resources preferentially to building on strengths rather than mitigating weaknesses. People are constructively equal in the eyes of the law, but most definitely not so in reality, and differ intrinsically in their abilities and aptitudes quite apart from any environmental contributions. No amount of batting practice would turn me into a Hank Aaron; conversely, no amount of education would turn a dullard into a Nobel Laureate.
At some point, contra liberal thought, the race is to the swift.
Another avenue the liberals are taking is to avoid dropping students as often as they once did. Having worked there as a temp for about 6 months I was told the number of classes are overfilling because of high enrollment. Meaning, the student body, which normally would be whittled down over the intervening years, was left unchanged creating real problems fitting all the added students in limited slots. Oh the administrative headaches that caused.
You have to feel sorry for the liberals, you really do. They constantly try to shovel water with a pitchfork because someone convinced them that that was the way things should be. So they shovel mightily, exhausting themselves, bankrupting everybody else, and achieving nothing. They are doomed to perpetual frustration, and can’t figure out why.
It is interesting that the proportion of black and hispanic students has gone down in the last 15 years. The change is probably not as drastic as pictured, due to the proportion of students who label themselves as multiracial today. The 1995 to 2010 change was 18% to 4% without multiracial students [no info on 1995] but was 18% versus 12% when multiracial students are included.
Send out the letters and see what happens.
I go with the suspicion that this speech was to a certain degree a faculty set-up. As such elite schools work the students very hard in comparison to what a regular high school would do, the normal response is pride in having survived such a rigorous course, not guilt. I had some exposure to a a high school that housed both magnet school and a regular high school. The normal magnet school student response to resentment from the regular high school students- and there was resentment- was that they worked their tails off, whereas the regular high school students were goof-offs. Which had a lot of truth to it, especially at the freshman level.
If those teachers at Hunter feel guilty about teaching classes with the current racial composition- almost a given from the PC climate – they all have the choice to not teach at Hunter and teach in a regular classroom. Guess how many would make such a choice? Very, very few. In fact, there is probably a large waiting list of teachers wanting to go the other way, from a regular school into Hunter.
OB:
“Why was he still there?” Because in their personal lives, the guilt-ridden, PC, multiculti socialists are all capitalists. That’s how they and their families live, survive, and prosper.
“…I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do any of you.”
It would seem to me that your actions moving forward, Mr. Justin Hudson, will determine whether you deserved the gift of education you received.
Giving yourself, and others, an excuse to devolve into mediocracy in spite of the opportunity you’ve been given will certainly prove you correct – that you were underserving.
“” the Hunter test may not have been well-publicized in schools in heavily black and Hispanic areas””
I got news for them. Most all of life’s test aren’t advertised in advance.
My son has a magnet on his refrigerator that says “School prepares you for the real world, which also sucks” 🙂
Hunter got the idea that his opportunity was due to luck from authors like Gladwell and his book Outliers: The Story of Success, which is a very well written and entertaining – slick – counter attack to the successful efforts of many pointing out problems with Affirmative Action. It also greatly overstates the case for luck. If you can’t change the test score differences, etc, then delegitimize the tests.
I had the chance a few years back to spend two years in a blue collar neighborhood made up of mostly Latinos and various East Asians -mostly Chinese. At first I didn’t even notice the Asian kids. The Hispanic kids after school and weekends are all over the streets, but with time I found out there are almost as many Asian kids – they’re just kept inside the houses. They could be playing video games, watching tv, or whatever, but I suspect they’re doing more studying. By the time they get to the local HS (60+% Asian 30+% Hispanic) where I have two kids attending, there are no Latino kids in the Honors or AP classes. There’s a de facto segregation by race.
So IMO I can’t say what role genetics plays in the outcome observed, but I have no doubt that culture does play a huge role. By the time these kids are ready to apply for college, is it fair to reward those who spent years in the streets not applying themselves to their studies?
Also, if anyone thinks the way to rectify the situation is to give bonus points for hardship growing up (eg poverty, single parent homes, etc) well that was the first thing the liberal elite at the university system tried in CA and they found that fairly and objectively applied it would result in even more Asian kids taking the top spots in the UC system (than they already do). That’s why they fall back on even vaguer criteria like life experience etc, which essentially comes down to getting bonus points for admittance based on race.
Y’all have missed a big point. The schools that were predominantly minority were responsible for publicizing the test. So, supposing I am principal of a school of mostly (rhymes with) truck-ups and I am going to publicize a test that will get the the good students out, the students I don’t have to see in the office every day, or excuse from class so that they can go see their probation officer, who bring up the average test scores for my school? I may have been crazy to take this job, but I’m not stupid!
It sounds like the faculty is trying to turn students into guilt-ridden community organizers and environmental activists. That’s child abuse in my book.
If they are serious about talent being unimportant, they can pay me to fill up their iPods. That’ll teach them.
Here is what an affirmative action student in design can produce:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/my-pet-marxist-and-the-democrats-perfect-new-logo/
Maybe the lefties aren’t as hypocritical as I thought.
Curiously enough, no one seems to worry about demographics when it comes to choosing students for the athletic teams.
I’m interested right now in other issues, such as what motivates a student such as Hudson to experience so much guilt that he feels the need to include this sentiment in a graduation speech
YWIMC!!!
Thats easy… the TRUTH is that different race groups do NOT perform at the same level.
(which is one reason why a meritocracy is better, those that perform exceptionally, can move upwards based on ability, drive, etc)
The MYTH promoted as the liberal truth (meaning lie), is that we all perform at the same level, its just our lives that are key. IE Tabula Rasa…
to keep it short, there is a small point also that extreme leftism also contains public confessional..
so whats up with this?
Well, since he was programmed to believe that differences are not genetic but circumstantial, then everything they told him his whole life is a lie, and all that made him what he is, was winning the lottery.
his whole life he is a fraud. he cant get over it because he is smart enough to understand the parts put together (gifted), but also trusting enough to try to compute contradictions which he believes were all honest and truthful, and not lies that he has to navigate.
If he accepts that he is gifted, he has to accept that races perform differently, and some in each perform exceptionally (and in truth, over hundreds of generations they move our species forward if we dont promote regression).
however, if he is to believe what he was taught, then there is no such thing as gifted, and the only reason he has what he has was this dumb test that gave him more, and took away from everyone else, who didnt get an equal education.
the system, and elite know that there is different levels, and this becomes VERY clear if you look at the curriculum, the different math, the different teaching methodologies. and not between the same kinds of school, but between the different major types.
This different performance thing is been a HUGE harmful problem because the way they have propagandized has completely screwed up stuff.
the link in the thread on studying i gave, gives an article on what they are and have been doing to the kids to play out their pet theory!!!
that is, they have been cooking the books in every direction possible to prove to us AND at the same time breed the self conformational results.
IE. by convincing us, and creating false pressures under that guise, eventually what was not real becomes real through selective breeding, demographics and outcomes over time.
but we are concerned not with the synoptic view, but the magnified view of what this does to a person (and a person who doesnt have the tools to cope with it)
he has been put in a double bind…
you may find he will commit suicide since his confession shows he isnt a sociopath, in which this would have no guilt and would just go along with it as it feeds the narcissm
anyway… read that article…
How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html
I got a slightly different lesson… but since i am very independent, didnt get programmed, and was a child of an immigrant, a lot of the BS that they were dishing out made no sense.
so white guilt wont work on me, i am first born here, and unless i did something, no one in my family has anything to do with any of that.
white privileged, i was kid of the kids of janitors. unles arranging garbage and doing odd jobs and being illiterate and not able to be in programs because your not a girl, gay, or a minority is privilege, no i didnt have that.
And i never got to finish my education, i moved from one living condition, to another condition, and that clearly showed me that they cared where and what they thought i came from, and not at all as to any validity, even if the points concerned their own ideas.
So there was no guilt for me, i self educated. i knew that there are gifted, and some of them are very weird and mental (oy), and brilliant and none of them are the same…
i went from inner city poverty, to lower middle class suburbia.. and went from being used by liberal educators as proof any program they put me in worked, to being discarded like toilet paper not worthy of being used, and foiled in every attempt to move forward. the lack of money insured that i could not, like other middle class, or upper middle class kids, afford to jump the hump myself (as reflected in the article)
My son has some of this kids guilt, becuase his moms grandmother is an american indian. soooooo, guess how come he was able to go and graduate with honors? because his results get put in the box under american indian…
before we even got into BxSci two friends committed suicide, and one had a nervous breakdown.
so what they put these kids through can be very intense, and the kids, like lots of kids, maybe more, want so badly to make everyone around them happy… even if they have to become mental themselves to accomodate it…
some, like me were lucky, we were inoculated in some way. others, like this kid, and my friend, were not. this kid feels he has to apologize that he was picked to be better than others… my friend, he is probably still in a rubber room..
He is also ripe for the picking… depending on how or if he resolves the crisis, will also put him in different places. he can end up being an elite looking down, as someone tells him the truth and adds the right stuff to it. he can also end up fighting against gifted programs, spending his mind trying to eradicate what to him is a injustice and a source of great angst.
the dual mind games of a collective, without the culture to give understanding, can cause mental disease… (throw in the brutality of adults doing things to children, and what those children then feel they owe the world…)
one thing to remember is that he is smart, he is useful, but he is broken so that his wings are clipped and he cant fly far on his own…
“… the percentage of minority students at Hunter is small.”
Actually, according to the statistics you give, the majority of the students at Hunter are minority students.
Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world’s most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of “progressive” educational methods. He wrote:
“The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them.”
He rightly saw that “progressive” methods were no help to the poor John Jay Ray – Education Watch International (blog)
“When an opponent says: ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.’.” Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933
AND for IRONY that comes from knowing history..
Bella Dodd: Was a graduate of Hunter College and New York University School of Law. She also served as head of the New York State Teachers Union. A schoolteacher and lawyer by profession, Dodd was an organizer for the CPUSA from 1932-1948, and from 1944 to ’48 sat on the CPUSA’s National Council. She was expelled from the CPUSA in 1949.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd
The New York Times reported on March 8, 1954 that Bella Dodd “…warned yesterday that the ‘materialistic philosophy,’ [i.e., dialectical materialism ] which she said was now guiding public education, would eventually demoralize the nation.”
In 1954, her book School of Darkness was published, wherein she opined that the Communist Party’s structure “was in reality a device to control the ‘common man'”
[also the deliberate dumbing down of america is free online here: http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/MomsPDFs/DDDoA.sml.pdf
and
underground history of american education is here
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12880618/John-Taylor-Gatto-Underground-History-of-American-Education%5D
the Hitler quote should make you rethink all the feminists and left wanting to destroy marriage (saying so outright in those words). For that’s how you turn a race connected to the past and history and all that, into a mass who has no history, and believes the world to be the way it is for all eternity. like the feudal of yore, the lower classes detached from the past, believe their place to be permanent, the conditions never changing, and part of a never ending eternal order where their purpose is whatever those above who do know tell them it is…
I had heard about that grad speech elsewhere but this was the first place where I saw it linked to disgruntled faculty. It makes complete sense to me.
It is another manifestation of the liberal=smart canard, I bet the faculty saw the most liberal essay and thought, wow this kid is a genius.
Incidentally, I gave a graduation speech that said FU to my school too, only mine was on the second law of thermodynamics. It was intended to lose the audience. The salutatorian of my class actually had to ask me what some of the words meant.
Although I do like SteveH’s refrigerator quote.
Educational T-ball.
Beautiful.
“”Here is what an affirmative action student in design can produce””
expat
That democrat logo is unbelievably lame. If it’s printed sporting a trademark symbol it’s downright hilarious.
Steve H,
I just checked my E-mail and saw that it made the German Yahoo news, and not as a joke. Another reason for the European artsy-crafties to look down on America.
Everyone is tip-toeing around a basic question: Is “intelligence” genetically inherited.
I recall that Steven Pinker – I believe in The Blank Slate – estimates that what we term intelligence is 60-70% inherited genetically.
Which implies that while environment is important to develop your intellectual successes, basically the limiting factors are inherited.
Now there is a subject and a set of assertions that get PC liberals in conniption fits. And just maybe the accursed “Bell Curve” book of a few years back was right…the road to success is a judicious choice for four grandparents.
Are primates more intelligent than non-primates? If so, why?
QED.
The student should be grateful and give thanks to a generous nation. But the Progressive template that is ubiquitous, coming from all sides, especially the education system, and daily drummed into all our heads by the media, takes its toll. All are daily assailed by the falsehoods of the Progressive agenda. Gratitude to America is not in the Progressive dictionary. It’s been replaced by a sullen attitude of injury and wrongly perceived injustice.
It takes a willful effort, an open mind and a desire to peer beneath the myriad Progressive axioms and assumptions to see the reality, the truth.
See Sugata Mitra on kids teaching themselves (vié¢ Bishop Hill).
The following sentiment is one that is killing us: “We received superior teachers and additional resources based on our status as ‘gifted,’ while kids who naturally needed those resources much more than us wallowed in the mire of a broken system.”
No, throwing most of our resources towards those that can’t use them leaves them unused. Nor is it socialism or communism – it is screwupism (I had a different word in there that I think was probably more appropriate in terms of sense, but not so in terms of politeness).
But then I guess in some way I do agree with what he said, but not in the way he meant – the resources were wasted on him and there are some very bright people out there that aren’t tools that could have put those resources to a MUCH better use.
You have the ability and have been given the opportunity to use them. You can easily take that gift and dedicate your life to helping them and there are *many* ways to do it, but only people of high intelligence and high education can do certain vital ones. Go do research into medication, safe engineered foods for starving areas, pursue state department postings to help educate the worlds poor, all sorts of things that *only* a smart educated individual can do.
But no, this person will probably spend 200k on a degree in “ethnic studies” and then spend the rest of his life attempting to pay that back and complaining that no one wants to hire him even though he is *vital* to the functioning of the country in some non-specified mystic way. That is usually by telling ethnics that they can succeed and be unemployed and poor just like him and trying to take away others opportunity to do what he did. Further add in becoming more and more bitter his whole life against the engineers and scientist that build bridges, irrigate arid lands, feed and clothe the poor, and cure major diseases and causes of death.
Maybe he will “see the light” so to speak, some do, some do not.
I’m a big fan of Pinker’s, “The Blank Slate.” Have read it twice and written an essay using his ideas.
To anyone willing to observe humans in action it’s readily apparent that we are all born with differing abilities, talents, etc. It is the nurturing part that shapes those talents for good or ill. There will always be a continuum of abilities so that some will be very adept at, say mathematics, and then a curve of decreasing ability to the point of no ability. But our goal is to have an education system that will teach all those differing levels of ability and, ideally, get each person to achieve as much as they are capable of in mathematics and other subjects. The question is: how to motivate all students so they will do their best? Grades and competition, the traditional methods of motivation, have been rejected by the progressives as too harsh. But their way leads to the crime of a poorly educated citizenry through the soft bigotry of low expectations.
IMHO the education industry, by and large, has become nothing more than an instrument of politically correct indoctrination. Unfortunately, this young Hunter School graduate reflects that all too well. Yes, he won the genetic lottery for academic ability. As a result, he has been given an opportunity that will help him go further in life. And yet he has absorbed the lesson of guilt. In a better education system he would be galvanized to go forth and do his best. Each citizen who becomes self supporting is a benefit to society. The few that create new businesses, new products, and new services that create jobs and wealth are an even greater benefit to society. Not all of us can be wealthy or highly creative, but we can all work to go as far as our God given abilities will take us. And the world will be the better for it.
This is all about CROWD CONTROL. These Leftists are always going for POWER.
Think about it: “it also gives the faculty leeway to select whomever it pleases based on other criteria” — means the Faculty are wresting the control from the students’ hands (native intelligence and their own hard work) and using their own Orwellian criteria to “select” whomever they please.
See what they did there? Tyrants, all of them.
JJ,
Spot on! There is also another aspect of contributing to society that has more to do with character than with career achievement. I am thinking of a man who worked at the kiosk of my local supermarket. When he left for a better job, all of my friends and I lamented his departure. It was because of the way he greeted everyone and chatted a bit that changed our attitude as we did our shopping. Perhaps we smiled more at fellow customers, were more patient at the checkout lines, or less snappy when we arrived home with our full grocery bags. He was completely replaceable in his function as clerk, but as a human being he gave something special to our small community. That lesson, not guilt, is what needs to be taught to the young.
“”There is also another aspect of contributing to society that has more to do with character than with career achievement””
expat
Absolutetly. My angst at higher taxes isn’t for purely selfish reasons. I see as clear as day the damage it does to the character of people it undeservedly gets redistributed to.
Beverly means the Faculty are wresting the control from the students’ hands (native intelligence and their own hard work) and using their own Orwellian criteria to “select” whomever they please.
See what they did there? Tyrants, all of them.
You got it right on the head… My big points were just saying the same thing but with all the background to make what you said more than just an other opinion.
Maybe Beverly and i are the only ones that notice that sociologists, under the guise of false knowing and a false competency, are experimenting on children without the children or parents permission.
If you talk to a left/liberal/progressive/statist and you ask them if what Dr Mengele did was ok, that is to experiment on children directly to achieve some end that Mengele and the system he was a part of wanted?
They would either be abhorred, or they would feign it. However, if you clearly point and show that each of these educational modifications and changes away from a traditional education that created the renaissance free thinkers (religious or not), under the guise of doing even better, or tuning it for a future (which is indeterminate), which is to fit a romanticism’s aesthetic.
The progressives in this case decided to borrow from Europe. but once again, notice the historical period. the period from 1800, to 1920, in which most of the public knowledge of history is EXTREMELY spotty.
“Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.”
Did anyone know this part of history? know that this is why we don’t have the nation dotted with free market cheap private schools the way we have the nation dotted with cell phones? (or are you going to tell me its harder to teach a kid than it is to create a cell phone and bring it to market?)
John Taylor Gatto
The Gospel of Wealth, 1889
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.html
The whole story has been a back and forth tug of war. Soros is the product of this line of thinking, which is NOT shared by all wealthy people. However if you go way back and read my post on each class sitting at an American table eating beyond their means at a shared place, it might be clearer. as the moral of that story is the attempt to take makes the wealthy vulnerable to such political logic.
[edited for length by n-n]
I agree with SteddieH @ 4:25 and strcpy @ 11:34. This is the story of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30
“For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
This boy’s life will become a guilt-ridden, living hell spreading like a cancer on society. Apparently he never entertained the thought to make the world a better place with his blessings. This is a great example of our Judeo-Christian tradition and America exceptionalism being destroyed by the Left. He’s right these gifts were wasted on him.
On the issue of Tabula Rasa:
Father absence linked to earlier puberty among certain girls
September 17th, 2010 in Medicine & Health / Health
http://www.physorg.com/news203920849.html
Girls in homes without a biological father are more likely to hit puberty at an earlier age, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
The findings, to be published Sept. 17 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that the absence of a biologically related father in the home predicted earlier breast and pubic hair development, but only for girls in higher income households. The findings held even after the girls’ weight was taken into account.
“The age at which girls are reaching puberty has been trending downward in recent decades, but much of the attention has focused on increased body weight as the primary culprit,” said study lead author Julianna Deardorff, UC Berkeley assistant professor of maternal and child health. “While overweight and obesity alter the timing of girls’ puberty, those factors don’t explain all of the variance in pubertal timing. The results from our study suggest that familial and contextual factors – independent of body mass index – have an important effect on girls’ pubertal timing.”
The findings came from the Cohort study of Young Girls’ Nutrition, Environment and Transitions (CYGNET), an epidemiologic project headed by Lawrence Kushi, associate director of etiology and prevention research at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. The project is part of the UC San Francisco Bay Area Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center (BCERC), one of four centers funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Early puberty has been linked to greater risk for breast and other reproductive cancers later in life, among other health impacts.
“Although the main focus of the CYGNET Study is on environmental exposures, we are also keenly interested in the social and behavioral contexts in which maturation occurs,” said Kushi. “These findings demonstrate that such factors may play important roles in the onset of puberty in girls.”
The link between father absence and earlier puberty in girls has been found in previous research, but most of those studies relied upon recall of the girls’ first periods, and few examined the contributions of body mass index, ethnicity and income.
In this new study, researchers recruited 444 girls ages 6-8 through Kaiser Permanente Northern California, and have been following them annually. Their analysis was based on the first two years of follow-up. They considered signs of puberty that occur before the start of menarche. In interviews with the girls’ caregivers, the researchers asked about the residents in the girls’ homes and their relationships to the children.
Among the girls studied, 80 reported biological father absence at the time of recruitment. Contrary to what the researchers expected, the absence of a biologically related father was linked to earlier breast development for girls in higher income families – those having annual household incomes of $50,000 or more. Father absence predicted earlier onset of pubic hair development only in higher income African Americans families.
The mechanisms behind these findings are not entirely clear, the study authors said. Evolutionary biologists have theorized that the absence of a biological father may signal an unstable family environment, leading girls to enter puberty earlier.
Another theory that has been posited is that girls without a biological father in the home are exposed more to unrelated adult males – specifically, the pheromones of these males – that lead to earlier onset of puberty. However, in this study, the presence of other adult males, including stepfathers, in the home did not alter the findings.
It is also unclear why father absence predicted early puberty only in higher income families, particularly for African American girls.
“It’s possible that in lower income families, it is more normative to rely upon a strong network of alternative caregivers,” said Deardorff. “A more controversial hypothesis is that higher income families without fathers are more likely to have a single mother who works long hours and is not as available for caregiving. Recent studies have suggested that weak maternal bonding is a risk factor for early puberty.”
Another possibility is that higher income girls in father-absent homes may be exposed to more artificial light – which has been shown to accelerate puberty in animal studies – through television, computers and other forms of technology, according to the study authors. The researchers also suggested that higher income African American girls may be more exposed to certain beauty products, such as hair straighteners, which have estrogenic properties that could influence pubertal timing.
The study adds to the debate of why girls in the United States are entering puberty at an increasingly early age. Last month, a study of 1,200 girls led by BCERC researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center found that about 15 percent of the girls showed the beginnings of breast development at age 7, an increase from similar studies conducted in the 1990s.
“The hunt for an explanation to this trend is significant since girls who enter puberty earlier than their peers are not only at greater risk for reproductive cancers, they are also more likely to develop asthma and engage in higher risk sexual behaviors and substance abuse, so these studies have broader relevance to women’s health,” said Bay Area BCERC’s principal investigator Dr. Robert Hiatt, UCSF professor and co-chair of epidemiology and biostatistics, and director of population science at the campus’s Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“In some ways, our study raises more questions than it answers,” said Deardorff. “It’s definitely harder for people to wrap their minds around this than around the influence of body weight. But these findings get us away from assuming that there is a simple, clear path to the earlier onset of puberty.”
Provided by University of California — Berkeley
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I have pointed this out in many of the recent posts about early maturity in which the blame was being assigned to plastics, and other things.
The point here is that it DOES make a difference if the blood father is there, and that absence changes things (so alternative families are NOT equivalent! in fact they represent genetically the accommodation that happens AFTER disaster to a family)
Praeder willi has the same trigger.. and if there are TWO there are more… mothers who dump dads thinking (even subconciously from media) that its going to be better and they will have more and less to deal with, are also hurting their daughters (as early maturity leads to generally lower outcomes).
its is showing that FAMILY as a structure conveys benifits that alternatives dont, and have to trigger adaptations to mitigate this indicated change.
over and over we are discovering that we as a species had intuited our biology and reflected it in cultural customs aligning living with biology
Ultimately it also falsifies tabula rasa, because it PROVES that mental and physical adaptations dominate
That, a machine made to work with information is NOT defined by that information.
You are NOT defined by the food you eat, even though you incorporate it into you.
We do not sit here and wonder as to what mix of nature nurture comes from food..
Even though we have foods that influence biology just as ideas do. (They are called medicines,
the mental ones are called ideas, mind worms, etc).
The idea is an illusion to jusitify ends… and so make means ok, when they really shouldn’t be.
To erase our cultural knowledge and leave us unmoored and disconnected forever…
The point is that this is a ‘machine’ which is NOT defined by its environment other than having to interface with it.
And interfacing with it, collecting information in many time frames, and comparing over time, creates the illusion.
The illusion then states the obvious, with the idea making it ok..
The obvious being that if you crap into the machine it will behave differently
And if we say that that’s normal, then we are ok to crap in the machine all we want to achieve ends.
But if we say that perturbs the normal condition of the machine, we will then be attacked for perverting it, programming it, changint the being from what they are supposed to be, into what we want them to be.
So if we assert norma, we can hide behind that, and the public will just sit there.
If we assert that it deviates from normal, as crapping in any machine does, then they
are going to be upset we keep crapping in the minds of children.
This incident reflects in microcosm a fundamental and tragic problem in black culture: the tendency to emulate crabs in a bucket, and drag back in any crab that attempts to escape.
Larry Elder tells this story: A friend brought him to a city recreation center and library in a mixed Black, Hispanic, and Asian neighboorhood. The rec center has a skateboarding area, and he watched the black and hispanic kids doing fabulous stunts on their boards. He was very impressed. Then his friend took him into the library. It was wall-to-wall Asian kids, and their parents, reading and studying. Not a black or Hispanic kid to be seen. And there’s the difference!
Occam, that’s because bucket escape by an individual breaks with solidarity that insist the bucket can only be rescued in masse by others.
Beverly Hills School District used to have a permit program under which kids from LAUSD were addmitted to encourage “diversity” (and collect some state funding dollars). (You may have seen this referred to obliquely in the movie “Real Women Have Curves.”) They ended the program this year, when state funding was cut back, and because the “diversity” turned out to be mostly Asian and affluent students from nearby neighborhoods.
Although why a school with 41% students from first generation immigrant families isn’t considered diverse, I don’t know. I guess “all minorities are equal, but some minorities are more equal than others.”
Oh, btw, black athletes somehow still get admitted to Beverly High on permits. “Diversity,” of course.
OB and Gringo – the faculty stays there because they need to prove that their reality is right, and this setting is the only one they can do it from. They are furious that reality is not conforming to their theory. They can’t leave. They’ve locked the doors from the inside.
I think Pinker is hedging just a bit to stave off even more controversy than he’s got now. It is possible to ruin someone’s intelligence with a bad environment (especially if includes drugs or blows to the head), but beyond a certain threshhold decent environment, genetics explains over 80% of the variance in IQ. Failing to recognise this, wanting not to hurt peoples’ feelings, we destroy lives of minority students. As people note here, Asian students excel, and at first glance it would seem to be cultural, and because they try harder. But children love mastering things, and they naturally gravitate toward things they can excel at. Despite all the sermonising, many of the minority students who are 1SD less intellectually gifted are not going to excel at certain academic tasks even if they try harder. Telling them the lie that they just aren’t trying, that their culture is bad, that they aren’t measuring up to what they should be able to do is damaging to them.
Someone mentioned sports and the lack of need for affirmative action there, and it provides an excellent picture. If you want to play basketball, you may well be able to succeed if you aren’t tall. You can be fast, you can work on 3 pointers, you can be a coach’s joy and learn the plays and work like a dog. You may not go to the NBA, but you can have some success. But you have to start from the knowledge that YOU’RE NOT TALL. People telling you you really are tall, but no one is seeing you right, is cruel.
You may decide to switch to a different sport. You may decide to coach. You may decide to drop athletics altogether. But if you go to a school where they insist that you are 6’5″ instead of 5’6″ and make you play forward, hinting that you aren’t outjumping those other forwards because you aren’t trying hard enough, you are doomed. Destroyed. You will give up before you are 16, your self-respect shot, certain you have poor character, and increasingly hang with losers.
And all because the faculty at your school needed to believe that you could be 6’5″ if you really tried.
As to the graduation speech, don’t be too quick to predict how this will turn out for this lad. He’s got some brains, he’s got some courage, and he just might be willing to look around for himself over the next decade and come to powerful conclusions. He’s young yet. I was an impassioned socialist at his age.
The “progressive” program is alive and well at all levels of public education. At the link below is a story (written and video) about the new “Trouble Free Playground” program” which a local elementary school is embracing. No tackling, no touching and no keeping score. With respect to the last policy prohibiting children from keeping score on the playground, the principal responds, “Our focus is not about, ‘Are you a winner or are you a loser?”
I would find it interesting but for the fact that its happening in my neighborhood.
http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/education/EGR-trouble-free-playground-riles-mom
AVI:
While that is a possibility, I consider it more likely that teachers stay at schools with high-performing students because they are in teacher heaven. They are teaching students who not only pick up concepts quickly, but also WANT to learn. In a regular school, they are much more likely to spend their time trying to get students to behave, which in some places can be compared to King Canute commanding the waves to stop, especially in a big city.
That is my take on the issue, having seen both magnet schools and regular schools.
Funny how the winners never mind the score being kept.
The principal of our kids’ elementary school (who was a Bay Area refugee/ infiltrator) banned tag. Reason? Someone could fall down and skin a knee. (I kid you not.) Comrade Principal also banned trading lunch items, on the grounds that some kids might have food allergies. She also restricted the number of cookies any given kid could bring in to school, apparently to differentiate dealers from mere users.
Needless to say, the kids detested her, and the parents weren’t too keen on her either, so she eventually went to a school elsewhere. Pyongyang Elementary is a good bet.
The kids always know the score, whether or not the adults will admit it.
In Gladwell’s defense, he cited the “10,000 Hour Rule” as one of the keys for achieving mastery. 10,000 hours of study would make a lot of students a lot better. Encouraging young people not to study hard because the system is “unfair” is moral malfeasance.
” the Hunter test may not have been well-publicized in schools in heavily black and Hispanic areas”
Please … as if every New Yorker with kids, and the kids, themselves, doesn’t already know about the magnet schools, like this one, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, …? Everyone knows about these schools and how you get in them. And, if they can’t find out, they’re really too stupid to bother taking the test.
But, New York will destroy these last good schools by dumbing down the tests (to avoid the dreaded disparate impact, no doubt – just as our empathetic Latina) just as they destroyed CCNY by having open admission (due to whining from people who really weren’t smart enough to get in and didn’t belong there).
Liberals are just locusts who destroy everything they touch, leaving a barren wasteland. Actually, they’re worse than locusts, since at least locusts are edible.
“…whether measured racial differences in intelligence are completely environmental or are the result at least partly of heredity.”. It’s culture – some ethnic cultures are better at inculcating successful behavior, others less so. But you can’t say that because it is evil and non-multi-culti. Did you see those stats, though? 41% of students at Hunter are Asian? Incredible! And what does that tell us?
It’s culture – some ethnic cultures are better at inculcating successful behavior, others less so.
The question remains, however, whether culture, itself, is generally an expression of the deeper genetic makeup of the population. This might sound a bit odd, but identical twin research has shown that some of the most specific behaviors (behaviors that no one would think hold any genetic connection) appear to be genetic in nature, even though people would normally assume them to be purely environmental – behaviors such as how one buttons a shirt or chews his food (I forgot the actual behaviors highlighted in the research and just offer these examples to give a flavor for the sorts of behaviors that were found to be common in identical twins who were split at birth and raised in different families and different cultural contexts). To put it more plainly, the general self-organizing character of different cultures might well be expressions of the common genetic makeup of the population.
I am not arguing that this is the case, but only that the specific cultures and cultural developments, which comprise the “environment” that people discuss, are not known to be divorced from the underlying genetics, themselves, even though most people assume them to be. But, when one thinks about it, the “natural” self-organizing characteristics of a genetically related population would not be totally divorced from the makeup of the self-reproducing genes.
My understanding is that Von Neumann considered the idea that mathematics was the natural language of the human nervous system, which meant that he saw deeper genetic reflections even in the most “objective” of human languages. Of course, he was not singling out any particular humans, but just the commonality of the human nervous system (clearly an emergent structure of the underlying genes).
It is pretty clear that just about anyone can be taught (and can learn) to be a highly proficient mathematician (or musician, or any other pursuit) capable of using the most complex mathematical tools. The question, however, is who will become a genius mathematician, as those are the people who create new mathematical tools and solve difficult problems, thereby pushing all of mathematics (and thus, all of society) forward. Such creative genius is not something that can be taught, but seems to be very much in the nature of the individual and his genes. Of course, having individual creative geniuses in large number is not a guarantor of a culture advancing as quickly as it could. This is demonstrated best in the Chinese, who have always had a large number of the world’s most creative and brilliant people, having had some of the most important technological breakthroughs long before anyone else on Earth (such as movable type, one of the most important developments for any society), but Chinese culture has never allowed these genius developments to be exploited to their full potential. It seems that the reason for this is that Chinese culture (and Oriental cultures, in general) have not valued progress and advancement as their main priorities, but have been oriented towards stability above all else, thereby building a collectivist basis to their society instead of a pursuit of individualism. So, even though they should have been able to take over the world more than several different times, the Chinese have never really tried to expand their influence, instead choosing to use their great abilities to wall themselves in – stability. Sadly, the Mongols showed them that walking around a wall is much easier than building it.
So, the two most important distinguishing factors that move a culture, it seems to me, come down to the number of natural geniuses (technological, as that is where actual power derives from, though one must look carefully at the geniuses in other pursuits that are generated, as genius is genius) that the culture generates and the main goals and aims of the culture, both of which can be argued to be expressions of deeper genetic makeup.
Just my thoughts on this.
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