From: Dehede011@aol.com
Date: Mon Sep 23 2002 - 11:01:56 MDT
In a message dated 9/23/2002 10:44:17 AM Central Standard Time,
d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au writes: Oh no, everyone yawns, another PC
rant. Not so. Consider two paragraphs from MAPPING HUMAN HISTORY by Steve
Olson (Bloomsbury, 2002): When researchers tracked down the children born to
German mothers and US soldiers during the Allied occupation of German in WWII
they found no difference in the IQ scores of children with African-American
versus European-American fathers.
Damien,
If you will permit me a horse back opinion and I limit myself entirely
to conditions within the US I think a lot will possibly become
understandable. Or at a minimum we can find some areas to investigate.
The Bell Curve reports a narrow but persistent difference in average
IQs between whites and blacks in the US.
Further, if you read John Taylor Gatto's book, available on line,
Underground History of American Education he describes the switch in systems
for teaching reading that began here in 1930.
He also describes how that switch in systems handicapped the black
student learning to read more than it did the white student learning to read.
How could this be so? Because the new system was faulty but in the
white home parents taught the white child the older better system. In the
black home the law had prevented blacks from learning to read for generations
so the black student didn't get the same kind of help.
I said this was a horseback opinion but I started school in 1940. We
started right into the first grade and began learning to read. Every day my
teacher taught me the newer look-say method. That night my mother sat me in
her lap and taught me phonics until I fell asleep right there. Just as John
Taylor Gatto says by the time I was in the 3rd grade my reading vocabulary
and my everyday vocabulary was identical. In fact by that time reading was a
source of new vocabulary.
I have to ask myself if the difference in IQ between the two races is
entirely explained by the blacks getting an inferior education even when that
education might look the same on the surface?
Maybe one reason I took The Bell Curve in stride is that I spent a
career out on factory floors working with all five of those ethnic groups
that we have been discussing here. Later I taught about 2500 Ford foremen a
course called Work Simplification -- although to be strictly forthcoming
those were almost totally mixed on black/white lines.
There were certainly cultural differences in the groups but if there
was an IQ difference it was strictly of statistical interest and totally
unobservable when rubbing shoulders and working together.
So I read those few pages in The Bell Curve and didn't worry about
them too much.
Ron h.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:14 MST