A college professor writes on FB: “I have now taught at both the university graduate and undergraduate levels for five years. The quality of student writing has never been worse. If I were a university president, I would require every incoming undergraduate to read E. B. White’s book, The Elements of Style.”
“I do grade on writing style as well as content, and if other faculty and students don’t like that, it’s too damn bad.”
“Loretta, the improvement of the English and writing skills of the children of New Jersey must be a bipartisan cause. You have always excelled in such efforts.”
Justin: No grammar is taught anymore at most High Schools. When we try to, we are told to teach to the test (in essence) and not get bogged down with such trivialities as grammar and style. ***SIGH***
Mary: “My boys complained for years when I edited their papers for spelling and grammar. I was brutal–much tougher than their teachers. When TJ scored 95% on the PSAT in writing they stopped complaining. Now, both boys are grateful, as they see their classmates struggle with writing elements they know intuitively.”
George Gilder: “Strunk and White is a menace. It offers rules for writing by pettifogs, puritans, and designers of public buildings and street signs. I think kids should be aroused to write purple phantasmagorias, acoustic tintinnabulations, reckless rampant incandescent bouquets, all wrapped in weeds wide enough for a Midsummer night’s tryst. You can always retro-prune–even “kill your babies”–in the cold light of dawn.”
Multiculturalism means the destruction of standards. Multi-racialism means the destruction of standards (because different races, on average, have different skills and abilities). No country has become more diverse and raised its standards (in education or morals etc). The only groups capable of resisting this rush to Idiocracy are largely homogeneous (whether they are Orthodox Jews or black Muslims or Japanese). Every year America is lowering its median IQ. We’re in a dysgenic spiral. Japan isn’t having these problems. You can assign Strunk & White to every kid but not every kid has the cognitive ability to use the book, finish high school, and proceed to college.
From the Wikipedia entry on Richard Lynn:
In Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Lynn reviews [49] the history of eugenics, from the early writings of Bénédict Morel and Francis Galton through the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century and its subsequent collapse. He identifies three main concerns of eugenicists such as himself: deterioration in health, intelligence and conscientiousness. Lynn asserts that natural selection in pre-industrial societies favoured traits such as intelligence and character but no longer does so in modern societies. He argues that due to the advance of medicine, selection against those with poor genes for health was relaxed.
Regarding intelligence, Lynn examines sibling studies. Lynn concludes that the tendency of children with a high number of siblings to be the least intelligent is evidence of dysgenic fertility. Lynn concedes that there has been a genuine increase in phenotypic intelligence, but argues that this is caused by environmental factors and is masking a decline in genotypic intelligence.
Lynn points to evidence that those with greater educational achievement have fewer children, while children with lower IQ come from larger families [50] as primary evidence that intelligence and fertility are negatively correlated. Continuing the theme of correlates of fertility, socioeconomic status appears to have a negative effect on fertility, which Lynn thinks is because there is increasingly ineffective use of contraception with declining socioeconomic class. Regarding intelligence, Lynn agrees with Lewis Terman’s comment in 1922 that “[t]he children of successful and cultivated parents test higher than children from wretched and ignorant homes for the simple reason that their heredity is better”.[citation needed]
Lynn goes on to present evidence that socio-economic status is positively correlated with indicators of conscientiousness such as work ethic and moral values and negatively with crime. Next the genetic basis of differences in conscientiousness is discussed, and Lynn concludes that twin studies provide evidence of a high heritability for the trait. The less conscientious, such as criminals, have more offspring.
While most of the book discusses evidence for dysgenics in developed countries, Lynn acknowledges that it is less strong in developing countries, but concludes that “dysgenic fertility […] is a worldwide phenomenon of modern populations” (p. 196).
Lynn concludes with an examination of counter-arguments. These include that the traits discussed are not genetically determined, that intelligence and fertility can be inversely related without dysgenics, that socio-economic classes do not differ genetically, and that there is no such thing as a ‘bad gene’. These arguments are dismissed, and Lynn asserts that these trends represent a serious problem. Finally, he expresses support for eugenics, which is the subject of his next book, Eugenics: A Reassessment.[51]
A review of Dysgenics by W.D. Hamilton, FRS, Royal Society Research Professor in evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford, was published posthumously in 2000.[52] In this lengthy review, written according to the author in “rambling essay format”, Hamilton writes that Lynn, “discussing the large bank of evidence that still accumulates on heritability of aptitudes and differentials of fertility, shows in this book that almost all of the worries of the early eugenicists were well-founded, in spite of the relative paucity of their evidence at the time”; in the second half of the review, several directions not covered in Lynn’s book are explored.
Another review of Dysgenics was written in 2002 by N.J. Mackintosh, FRS, Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology in the University of Cambridge.[53] Mackintosh writes that, “with a cavalier disregard for political correctness, he argues that the ideas of the eugenecists were correct and that we ignore them at our peril.” While recognising that the book provides a valuable and accurate source of information, he criticises Lynn for “not fully acknowledg[ing] the negative relationship between social class and education on the one hand, and infant mortality and life expectancy on the other.” He calls into question Lynn’s interpretation of data. He also points out that according to Lynn’s reading of the theory of natural selection, “if it is true that those with lower IQ and less education are producing more offspring, then they are fitter than those of higher IQ and more education”; he writes that, on the contrary, the eugenecists’ arguments rest not as Lynn suggests on some “biological imperative, but rather on a particular set of value judgements.”
In Eugenics: A Reassessment (2001),[51] Lynn argues that embryo selection as a form of standard reproductive therapy would raise the average intelligence of the population by 15 IQ points in a single generation (p. 300). If couples produce a hundred embryos, he argues, the range in potential IQ would be around 15 points above and below the parents’ IQ. Lynn argues this gain could be repeated each generation, eventually stabilising the population’s IQ at a theoretical maximum of around 200 after as little as six or seven generations.
In the same book Lynn discusses proposals by David Lykken and others before him to introduce a license scheme for would-be parents. Lynn agrees in principle but suggests that the only practical way to make it work would be to introduce the compulsory sterilisation of every girl and boy at aged 12 – either via medical procedures which each adult would have to apply to get removed or via a virus that would cause sterility for a set period of time.[54]
Eugenics received praise in a review by behavioural geneticist and Pioneer grantee, David T. Lykken as “[an] excellent, scholarly book …one cannot reasonably disagree with him on any point unless one can find an argument he has not already refuted.”
Lynn spoke at the 2012 American Renaissance conference. He argued that the West has undergone six generations of dysgenic breeding, and that dysgenics is also occurring on a global scale due to sub-replacement level fertility among Europeans and East Asians while the population of sub-Saharan Africa soars, and because of Third-World immigration into Western countries.[56] Lynn opined that Western democracies lacked the firmness of will to implement a truly rigorous eugenics program, and that this lack of will to stop dysgenic breeding and dysgenic immigration stemmed from the fact that Westerners had become “too nice.”
RAYMOND WOLTERS WRITES IN HIS NEW BOOK:
As has been noted, Diane Ravitch criticized many of the recent trends in school reform. But Ravitch paid no attention to IQ studies that suggested that the racial achievement gap stemmed from the fact that White and Asian students, on average, are smarter than African Americans and Mestizo Hispanics. When she ignored the research on IQ, Ravitch followed the example of most other education scholars and writers. She apparently recognized that most societies have pervasive orthodoxies that are maintained by a tacit agreement not to discuss certain matters. She probably sensed as well that many people would regard any such discussion of race and IQ as bad manners.
Other scholars and writers, however, believed that the racial gap in achievement was based on a racial gap in average IQ and that this gap was due, in part, to genetic inheritance. Many of these scholars believed that the influence of genes was so great that racial and ethnic achievement gaps could not be eradicated and were not likely to be reduced substantially. ”Those who emphasized the importance of inherent differences often were called “hereditarians.” In recent years, many hereditarians have called themselves “race realists.”
The mainstream media gave the impression that only a few maverick racists subscribed to hereditarianism and that the great majority of well-informed observers were egalitarians who believe that group differences are purely the result of cultural influences. Egalitarians maintain, for example, that the effects of slavery, segregation, and discrimination account for the fact that the average IQ of black Americans trails that of whites by about one standard deviation.
Yet egalitarianism is not the prevailing opinion among experts in the field of psychological measurement. When Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman surveyed more than 600 such experts in 1988, most of these experts agreed with the assertion that IQ tests accurately measured the ability to solve problems and to reason abstractly; and most also agreed with the statement that the IQ gap between Blacks and Whites was due in part to racial inheritance. Among these experts, the prevailing opinion was that “nurture”counted but that “nature”was responsible for at least half of the racial disparity in average IQs.
Snyderman and Rothman did “survey research” that allowed respondents to answer anonymously. The answers might have been different if the experts had been identified. In modern America, after all, the penalty for linking intelligence with heredity and race could be severe.
This point was illustrated in the reaction to *The Bell Curve* (1994), in which Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray made the case for the importance of IQ (and also suggested that, in accounting for racial disparities, “the data . . .tip toward a mixture of genetic and environmental influences”). The 845-page book enjoyed phenomenal sales success…
In 2010 Robert Weissberg published an especially trenchant critique of school reform, Bad Students, Not Bad Schools. Because Weissberg emphasized that basic intelligence is a key to academic achievement, some readers might regard his book as another hereditarian work. Yet this would not be correct. Weissberg noted that science has not yet defined the boundaries between genetic and cultural influences, and he also emphasized the importance of motivation. He acknowledged that the academic work of weak students would improve if school reformers could convince those students that schoolwork was important. He did not dwell on IQ, DNA, or HBD (human bio-diversity).
*Bad Students* grew out of personal experience as well as reading and thinking about American education. Weissberg was born in New York City in 1941. His family was satisfied with the education provided at their neighborhood elementary school, PS 75 (the Emily Dickinson School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side). But there were problems at the Booker T. Washington Junior High School, which young Robert attended for a few weeks in 1953. This was a decade before many other New York schools “slipped into near disaster,”but conditions at Booker T. had already deteriorated to the point that police had to be stationed on every floor. When Robert’s mother heard stories of “mayhem bereft of any learning (other than skillfully avoiding schoolyard confrontations), ”her response was “‘*genugestgenug*’(enough is enough in Yiddish).” The Weissbergs became early participants in White flight when they moved to suburban New Jersey, where Robert eventually graduated from Teaneck High School. He went on to receive a liberal arts education at Bard College and graduate training in political science at the University of Wisconsin. Weissberg then became a professor at Cornell University and at the University of Illinois. Over the course of three decades, he published several books including, *The Politics of Empowerment* (1999), *Polling Policy and Public Opinion* (2002), *The Limits of Civic Activism* (2005), and *Pernicious Tolerance* (2008).
In 2004, after being away from New York City for forty years, Weissberg returned to his home town as a retired professor emeritus. When he described his experiences at Booker T. Washington JHS to a recent president of that school’s PTA, he learned that conditions had become even worse. When he spoke to teachers from other schools, he heard similar reports. But “what finally instigated rethinking . . .was actually meeting many of America’s notable educators”–education professors and writers, high-ranking public officials, and wealthy philanthropists who were privately financing efforts at school reform. Most of these people were smart, and all were serious, but their opinions impressed Weissberg as “little more than heartfelt clichés.”
Thinking back to his days as a student at Booker T. Washington, Weissberg recalled that the school had been almost brand new in 1953 and there was nothing wrong with the teachers, save that they had to spend too much time trying “vainly . . .to control miscreants.” The problem had been with the students. Too many were “intellectually mediocre.” Too many “disdain[ed] academic achievement.” Too many were troublemakers. Yet when Weissberg discussed the state of public education with the leading experts and school reformers half a century later, “not a single pontificator put any blame on students themselves.” Some experts on the left echoed Jonathan Kozol{Kozol, Jonathan} and said that schools were struggling because of inadequate funds; others followed Howard Gardner and Theodore Sizer and found fault with directive teaching that did not allow students to achieve deep understanding by constructing their own knowledge.
Meanwhile, many experts on the right agreed with E. D. Hirsch’s critique of progressive education, while others said that things would be better if more veteran teachers followed the example of the young, hard-working rookies who enlisted in Teach for America. Experts from the left and right joined together in saying that schools and teachers should be held accountable for the scores their students made on standardized tests. None of the experts “put any blame on students themselves. . . . . The unpleasant possibility that students themselves hated school and their aversion was beyond remediation was . . .unthinkable, and voicing it breached decorum.”
The conversations reinforced Weissberg’s recognition that a sea change had occurred in the-late 1960s. In the 1950s and early 1960s, against the background of the Cold War, most public schools had emphasized the importance of educating the brightest students. Grouping students by ability came into vogue, and many high schools added advanced placement courses to the curriculum. But the emphasis shifted after the post-Sputnik panic was replaced by concern about civil rights and race riots. Whether on the left or the right, mainstream educators no longer emphasized the importance of “helping a few Whiz Kids master quantum mechanics so as to protect us from Soviet rockets.”Instead, educators shifted their emphasis to “moving the entire school population, but especially those at the very bottom, up a few notches.”“Uplifting the bottom, not rewarding the smartest of the smart, became the new official policy.”…
*Bad Students* was a relentless critique of this “educational romanticism.” Weissberg insisted that responsibility for learning should be shifted to students and their families, where most people had always recognized it belonged. With a combination of erudition and wit that is rare in scholarly analyses of public policy, Weissberg said “what everybody (or nearly everybody) knows to be true but is fearful of expressing in public – America’s educational woes just reflect our current demographic mix of students.”
Weissberg posited that academic achievement (A) depends on a combination of intelligence (I), motivation (M), resources (R), pedagogy (P), and teaching (T). He recognized that even smart and motivated students do not learn algebra on their own. Teachers, textbooks, and other resources (T and R) are necessary. He acknowledged that the pedagogy or curriculum of a school (P) also matters. Even as he skewered E. D. Hirsch for demanding “a near Stalinist centralization of state authority over schooling” (because Hirsch would impose a one-size-fits-all system of national standards and national testing), Weissberg also indicated that he personally thought “core knowledge”was better than “constructivism.” Yet while acknowledging the importance of resources, pedagogy, and teaching, Weissberg maintained that intelligence and motivation matter even more…
Racially balanced integration provided a second set of “natural experiments.”Due to White flight, integration was usually a short-lived transitional period between the time when large numbers of African Americans moved into a school and most Whites moved out. Nevertheless, there were exceptional instances where racially balanced integration persisted for a generation or more. In these instances of persisting integration, Black students enjoyed “every advantage imaginable in a ‘good school’including learning side-by-side with smart white students.” But this did not change academic outcomes.
Weissberg did more than highlight the failure of integration to boost the academic achievement of non-Asian minorities. He also contended that integration depressed the achievement of White students. Although test scores and other statistics are not conclusive on this point, there are numerous descriptive accounts of the decline of education in the wake of integration, and Weissberg provided yet more descriptions. In one community near San Diego, for example, there were seven elementary schools, five of which were failing. When students from the five were allowed to transfer to the remaining two, “the influx of refugees . . .outraged parents who paid a housing premium to enroll their offspring in the nearby superior school.” They soon discovered that their high quality schools were “suddenly plagued by physical violence and ‘purple language’ thanks to these new arrivals.” This should not have been a surprise, Weissberg wrote, and he asked: “Can one honestly insist that bullies and petty thieves will mend their ways if only sent to crime-free schools? A more likely scenario is that they will be energized by easy pickings.”
In their efforts to “make integration work,” racially balanced schools also moved away from grouping students by ability, relaxed standards of decorum, and placed more emphasis on remedial education and multiculturalism. As they did so, an increasing number of White families fled to private schools and distant suburbs. Weissberg devoted one chapter to what he called “the war on academic excellence.” “The foolishness of the ‘war’against America’s most talented,”he wrote, “is almost beyond belief, a relentless pursuit of an egalitarian{egalitarianism} fantasy at the expense of genuine educational accomplishment.”
…In emphasizing the importance of intelligence, Weissberg confronted what he called an “obvious truth” that most experts did not face. “Racial differences in cognitive ability” had become “great taboos,” Weissberg wrote. “A straight-talking public conversation about education when it wanders into the racial/ethnic minefield is nearly impossible. Lying is endemic; explanations of why African-Americans do so poorly can be near mystical.”In an egalitarian world, “hard-nosed realists”were “shunned or forced into silence,”while “those skilled in manipulating statistics or flattering those desperate to hear good news …rise to the top,”“survival-of-the-fittest style.”
…Although Weissberg expressed his views candidly, he was also a careful scholar. He said it was “nonsense” to “just assume” that all groups have “equal proficiency {Dogma of Zero Group Differences}.” He noted that after publication of *The Bell Curve* (1994), fifty-two leading researchers affirmed that group-related variations in intelligence were real. He mentioned the “sizeable, scientifically-respectable literature [that] shows that IQ is substantially inheritable, and varies by demographic groups.” He personally thought that the academic superiority of Caucasians and Asians was “likely to be at least partly genetic.”
