Of course. It's a question brought forth by a columnist, see below.
I think a better way of putting it is uneducable. All can be taught to do something, whether it's mopping floors or building The Bomb. It's a sliding scale. But in the classic liberal arts sense of education? Not for all, that's for sure.
Thomas Jefferson says the same thing in his Notes on the State of Virginia but in a hyper meritocratic way that's shocking to our modern, sensitized, politically correct ears. (He refers to ninety percent or so of the grammar students as "rubbish," for example, who would not go on to high school but to vocational-type training.)
I think a better way of putting it is uneducable. All can be taught to do something, whether it's mopping floors or building The Bomb. It's a sliding scale. But in the classic liberal arts sense of education? Not for all, that's for sure.
Thomas Jefferson says the same thing in his Notes on the State of Virginia but in a hyper meritocratic way that's shocking to our modern, sensitized, politically correct ears. (He refers to ninety percent or so of the grammar students as "rubbish," for example, who would not go on to high school but to vocational-type training.)
If IQ is as predictive as I've learned it is--the most studied concept in the social sciences, actually--then, yeah, there are some children who are too dumb, or "morons," to be technical, to be taught material in which average to above-average students need to be taught. But things have been dumbed down, such as textbooks, something Diane Ravitch analyzed a few years ago, to help out the mediocre and the -isms of liberalism: feminism, identity politics, multiculturalism, und so weiter.
It's the problem of the left-hand side of the bell curve, a topic few dare to address, unlike Steve Sailer.
But a liberal, bringing emotion into it and the common fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, ("after this, therefore because of this") disagrees. In this instance, Dave Murray, a columnist for M(ichigan)live.com, writes, "Are There Some Children Who Are 'Unteachable'?" He answers, No. I wish he'd spent some time in Detroit public schools, where the scores of a recent standardized test were so low, lowest on record, almost lower than if the students there had merely guessed and had never gone to school! I've written about it. In 2009 Detroit students scored the lowest on record for the NAEP, a national standardized test.
And try teaching some of these children, Dave.
Leave a comment