A review of:
By:
CHRIS BRAND (author of THE g FACTOR and consultant to the Woodhill Foundation, USA)
This 664-page tome is described by its publishers as 'The National Bestseller', and so it might be. Though inviting purchasers to use it as 'a resource to dip into' rather than as a book to read, it provides exhortations which many anxious parents will welcome. It properly deplores the dumbing down of American education that has left the country languishing in international comparisons of schoolchildren's educational levels. Incisively, it points out that America is mocked by the relatively high levels of 'self-esteem' shown by its modern youngsters whose teachers' hypersensitivity about 'elitism' has encouraged a perverse contentment with mediocre school achievements. The Educated Child unequivocally blames permissiveness, relativism, constructivism, political correctness, multiculturalism and self-serving teachers' unions for the disaster; and it tries to show what concerned parents can do without having to pay through the nose for private education.
Such an effort – complete with lists of books to read and organizations to contact – could well appeal in the land that first thought of sending most of its children to 'university' in fulfilment of the American dream. Now that the USA's system of public education produces third-world results (except for the 2% of students eventually reaching postgraduate levels in their late-twenties) and is keenly defended only by the many egalitarian teachers, counselors and bureaucrats who have colonized it, plenty of middle class parents want to find a way for their own kids through the ideological pieties of state-funded educationalists. They may not wish to follow Ivan Illich in 'de-schooling society'; and they may not be ready to agree with those who take Charles Murray's Bell Curve seriously and argue that only 15% of children can profit from stictly academic instruction beyond age 16. But they are suspicious enough of schools to want 664 pages of alternatives by their sides.
'Parental involvement' is the core of Bennett et al.'s
proposed solution to the problems arising from the neosocialist take-over of
education which has focused teachers' attention obsessively on minorities. With
a remorseless insistence that only 664 pages can supply, the authors set out a
programme of parental activism so daunting that no ambitious parent could
complain that the authors' inspiration ever failed. No advice for parents and
children is too trite to be abjured by the authors:
"Every morning you must send him off to school with a good night's
sleep, a decent breakfast and a positive attitude towards learning."
"Good penmanship requires discipline. . .we
urge you to work on
neatness and legibility with your child at
home."
"Call out vocabulary words, spelling words, or
math facts to your child."
Children and their teachers must be constantly monitored, hectored, rewarded and punished – the children by TV-deprivation and school principals by protests and demonstrations from angry parents. Repeatedly, ambitious parents are advised to 'spend a few minutes each day' reading to their child, listening to their child, talking with their child, improving diction, visiting public libraries, mastering computing, going out on the Net, revising drafts of the child's homework, sitting in on classes, harrying teachers, writing to the school principal or organizing parent groups. Altogether, the book offers some 1,000 advices to anxious parents as to how to fill gaps in their days, and some 500 ways of detecting failures in their children's schools. The "minutes" add up to a massive investment: apparently not a single day can develop under its own logic or with much input from the child.
Naturally, the hard-pressed parent is prevented from
complaining about a book that will turn him into a pariah with his child, his
child's school and probably his wife. It is only a question of a few good
ideas, after all; and the authors repeatedly cover their backsides by urging
parents to exercise moderation and caution in the domestic tyrannies of
educational supplementation that they are urged to establish. Nor will the
anxious parent be able to complain of information overload. One might have
thought that, in 664 pages, Bennett et al. would have had room to set out for
parents the key geometrical theorems and grammatical principles which keen
parents would most often need at hand so as to help their progeny. But no such
practical help is offered – not even the rhymes for younger children by which
they might memorize the months of the year or the Kings of England. The book
offers general advice rather than immediate hands-on help:
Research the history of something old in town
Turn vacations into history lessons
Celebrate holidays and anniversaries
Make a time capsule
Help your child find heroes in history
Expose your child to key American documents
No short cuts are given, so readers must just feel guilty if they don't precisely recall why they should, on vacations with their offspring, "head for places such as the Alamo in Texas." The book is a set of aides memoires inviting Americans to reconstruct the history of the West and America, and making them feel rotten if they cannot immediately make their own contribution. 'Expose your child to key American documents', indeed! Shades of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book! Bennet et al. urge constant vigilance about children's drug use and sexual experimentation (absolutely nothing is to be allowed before age 14), yet offer none of the detail that might assist parents actually to identify with which illicit substances or sexually transmitted diseases their youngster has lately been in contact. Any amount of freedom is surely preferable to such uninformed mistrust of one's own children.
Again, readers of The Educated Child will not be able to complain that the book's para-educational regimen is completely unrealistic for any parent who wants to have a life – let alone a job or responsibility for other children or adults. Although the book sets out to inspire parents with what can be done without expenditure (except on baking cakes for teachers and inviting those functionaries home for meals, readers are advised), no evidence is offered that tyrannizing a child and alternately flattering and hectoring its teachers will actually work. The authors plainly rely on readers' own initiative to get into the spirit of educational supplementation. Illusions are not actually encouraged by factual claims in the text. Finally, by page 501, the authors start admitting that parents frustrated by modern miseducation will frankly need to consider switching their children to a different school or taking political action to bring back educational tracking and streaming.
No: the only complaint that any likely reader might sustain would be that the authors fail to offer any refund for a book that says little that the typical middle class parent could not say off the top of his own head. Endless banal advice can only have the effect of boring and alienating readers – when it does not worsen their anxiety neuroses about their children. Any 'bestseller' status of the volume must reflect its having caught a marked turn in the tide of public opinion against the liberal elite that now controls state education. Bennett et al. possess no convincing ideas about what to do about schools having being turned into goofy chapels of low-level 'anti-racist' propaganda, but they empathize with the fears of middle Americans who mistrust TV, modern art, 'whole language' teaching and sloppily dressed schoolteachers. Such parents will thank the authors for excusing them from reading all 664 pages. Soon they will have only to reach the volume down from their bookshelves to trigger instant conditioned contrition and promise of emendation of life from their offspring. In the dumbed-down world of modern parenting, this book probably provides passable value for money so long as the parent does not waste time reading it.
The Educated Child offers a plausible, if undocumented critique of America's educational problems; and plenty of improving ideas which will look reasonable so long as the parent does not move from the armchair to attempt to implement more than one or two of them. What is missing is any hard core of realism, and in particular any mention of IQ. By all means, the authors occasionally favour matching education to children's "abilities" so as to supply sufficient challenge and encouragement to all; and they correctly dismiss as hooey the unsubstantiated opinion of Harvard University's Howard Gardner that there are lots of different types of intelligence (a dogma allowing teachers to maintain a febrile optimism that every child is a genius at something). Yet school tracking is buried among endless tips for what worried parents should do around the house; and Bennett et al. cannot bring themselves to mention human psychology's best-known and most researched variable which alone might provide a fair and sensible way of assigning children to different school tracks.
It is inconceivable that such senior and experienced American educators can be ignorant about IQ. Apparently, political correctness and fear of accusations of 'racism' now prevail even with conservative authors who admit that parents who follow their book's advices will find themselves criticized as "right-wing extremists." The omission of reference to IQ (and of course to scholars of IQ such as Arthur Jensen) is doubly strange in writers who want not only to re-introduce tracking but to have teachers resume teaching. For the only way to ensure that there will be enough good teachers for all children (even the dullest) under tracking is to reward teachers for 'value-added' teaching that improves – over a school year – on what would otherwise be expected from children's IQ's alone. Only in that way will teachers happily agree to teach dullards and the mediocre.
Fearing that mentioning IQ will have them branded as beyond the pale, the moderate rightists Bennett et al. thus leave a yawning gap at the heart of their speculations and exhortations. Furthermore, since they cannot mention IQ, they are equally feeble about other ways in which parents and teachers might try to establish what their individual charges are actually like in personality and interests. Only a few medical categories, such as attention deficit, are considered in any detail; and, in the indirect only admission the existence of children of below IQ 90, the authors make the otherwise astonishing claim that 20% of American children have 'learning disabilities.' Instead of having parents examine their children's true natures and select education accordingly, these authors would rather parents duplicate the bizarrely unfocused efforts of existing state schools.
In fairness, Bennett et al. do have their own philosopher's stone that might seem to offer the anxious parent some simple guidance through the miseducational maze. Time and again, readers are advised of the importance of hard work – of which parents themselves are certainly going to have plenty if they follow Bennett et al. at all conscientiously. Hard work is "essential" to academic success (along with 'responsibility' and 'respect' – p. 407). The authors admire what they call the 'East Asian' idea that, even if at different speeds, "most children can reach basic academic goals." Apparently, "it is essential that you foster in your own home that same faith that hard work is the key to school success" (p. 411). Incentives must be mobilized to induce hard work (p. 413): "Plan a favorite activity to do together after study time – playing catch or a board game. Bring out a snack. Let your child know that if she doesn't study, there will be consequences." Even "belief in the value of hard work" is itself a 'key virtue' (p. 533). Apparently, "intellectual intelligence of the traditional sort" – thus do the authors avoid dangerous talk of IQ – "is surely not all that matters when it comes to getting a good education – hard work, for example is also valuable."
Just where Bennett et al. would turn for empirical support for their core belief is left entirely unspecified in their 664 pages – for theirs is not that kind of book. Yet it must be said that mainstream psychometric research offers them no encouragement. Whereas IQ will predict educational attainment with correlations of around .50 over 10 years, measures of conscientiousness barely manage correlations of .25, even concurrently. Of course, stories abound of the long hours of practice put in by many budding geniuses from their earliest years; but in such cases hard work is usually a response to high ability and can scarcely be mimicked by the talentless -- who would simply find the effort unrewarding.
Always thought virtuous by conservatives, hard work has lately been enjoying a quite new lease of life in the hands of left-wing behaviorists (like the UK's Michael Howe and America's Stephen Ceci). These psychologists who don't believe in mind and personality have hoped to maintain that adolescents' enduring differences in achievement can be attributed not to genes and IQ but to corrigible differences in hard work and hours on the job. Routinely, they ignore the fact that talent makes for practice quite as much as practice makes for talent. It speaks volumes that Bennett et al. should so often find consolation in the myth of practice rather than face the reality of IQ and encourage research into tracking that uses IQ to bring relevant help to the individual child. Recent academic researches and reviews (Benbow & Lubinski, 1996; Brand, 1996) have been seriously encouraging for educators who believe tracking-by-IQ helps children of all intelligence levels to be both happier and more successful; and there is evidence that Black children, in particular, benefit from being taught in intellectually homogeneous groups. It is disgraceful that three authors who all once held senior positions at the US Department of Education should not have been able to draw on such supportive research work in 1999. (No wonder President Reagan abolished the Department!) Though properly wishing, late in the day, to counteract the baleful influence of PeeCee, these authors are themselves thoroughly infected by it. Such timidity about IQ betrays the concerned parents of America – depriving them of the one concept they actually need.
BENBOW,
Camilla P. & LUBINSKI, D. (eds.) (1996). Intellectual Talent:
Psychometric and Social Issues. Baltimore and London : The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
BRAND,
C. R. (1996). The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its
Implications. Chichester, UK : Wiley DePublisher.
For
more from differential psychologist Chris Brand on psychology and education
today, go to http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/index2.htm.