The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (74 page)

Why should the federal government shift money from programs for the disadvantaged to programs for the gifted, when we know that a large portion of the gifted come from privileged families? Why not just support programs for the gifted who happen to come from poor families as well? In Part I, we went to some lengths to describe the dangers of a cognitive elite. And yet here we call for steps that could easily increase the segregation of the gifted from everyone else. Won’t programs for the gifted further isolate them?

The answers to such questions have nothing to do with social justice but much to do with the welfare of the nation, including the ultimate welfare of the disadvantaged.

The first point echoes a continuing theme of this book: To be intellectually gifted is indeed a gift. Nobody “deserves” it. The monetary and social rewards that accrue to being intellectually gifted are growing all the time, for reasons that are easily condemned as being unfair. Never mind, we are saying. These gifted youngsters are important not because they are more virtuous or deserving but because our society’s future depends on them. The one clear and enduring failure of contemporary American education is at the high end of the cognitive ability distribution.

Ideally we would like to see the most gifted children receive a demanding education
and
attend school side by side with a wide range of children, learning firsthand how the rest of the world lives. But that option is no more available now than it was during the attempts to force the racial integration of urban schools in the 1960s and 1970s. The nation’s elementary and secondary schools are highly segregated by socioeconomic status, they will tend to become more so in the future, and
the forces pushing these trends are so powerful, stemming from the deeply rooted causes that we described in Part I, that they can be reversed only by a level of state coercion that would be a cure far deadlier than the disease.

Most gifted students are going to grow up segregated from the rest of society no matter what. They will then go to the elite colleges no matter what, move into successful careers no matter what, and eventually lead the institutions of this country no matter what. Therefore, the nation had better do its damnedest to make them as
wise
as it can. If they cannot grow up knowing how the rest of the world lives, they can at least grow up with a proper humility about their capacity to reinvent the world de novo and thoughtfully aware of their intellectual, cultural, and ethical heritage. They should be taught their responsibilities as citizens of a broader society.

The educational deficit that worries us is symbolized by the drop in verbal skills on the SAT. What we call verbal skills encompass, among other things, the ability to think about difficult problems: to analyze, pick apart, disaggregate, synthesize, and ultimately to understand. It has seldom been more apparent how important it is that the people who count in business, law, politics, and our universities know how to think about their problems in complex, rigorous modes and how important it is that they bring to their thinking depth of judgment and, in the language of Aristotle, the habit of virtue. This kind of wisdom—for wisdom is what we need more of—does not come naturally with a high IQ. It has to be added through education, and education of a particular kind.

We are not talking about generalized higher standards. Rather, we are thinking of the classical idea of the “educated man”—which we will amend to “educated person”—in which to be educated meant first of all to master a core body of material and skills. The idea is not wedded to the specific curriculum that made an educated man in the nineteenth-century British public school or in the Greek lyceum. But it is wedded to the idea of certain high intellectual goals. For example, to be an educated person meant being able to write competently and argue logically. Therefore, children were taught the inner logic of grammar and syntax because that kind of attention to detail was believed to carry over to greater precision of thinking. They were expected to learn Aristotle’s catalog of fallacies, because educators understood that the ability to assess an argument in everyday life was honed by mastering the formal elements of logic. Ethics and theology were part of the curriculum, to
teach and to refine virtue. We will not try to prescribe how a contemporary curriculum might be revised to achieve the same ends, beyond a few essentials: To be an educated person must mean to have mastered a core of history, literature, arts, ethics, and the sciences and, in the process of learning those disciplines, to have been trained to weigh, analyze, and evaluate according to exacting standards. This process must begin in elementary school and must continue through the university.

Our proposal will sound, and is, elitist, but only in the sense that, after exposing students to the best the world’s intellectual heritage has to offer and challenging them to achieve whatever level of excellence they are capable of, just a minority of students has the potential to become “an educated person” as we are using the term. It is not within everyone’s ability to understand the world’s intellectual heritage at the same level, any more than everyone who enters college can expect to be a theoretical physicist by trying hard enough.
At every stage of learning, some people reach their limits.
This is not a controversial statement when it applies to the highest levels of learning. Readers who kept taking mathematics as long as they could stand it know that at some point they hit the wall, and studying hard was no longer enough.

The nation has been unwilling to accept in recent decades that the same phenomenon of individual limitation applies at every level of education. Given the constraints of time and educational resources, some students cannot be taught statistical theory; a smaller fraction of students cannot be taught the role of mercantilism in European history; for even a smaller fraction, writing a coherent essay may be out of reach. Each level of accomplishment deserves respect on its own merits, but the ideal of the educated person is in itself an ideal that must be embraced openly. By abandoning it, America has been falling short both in educating its most gifted and in inculcating, across the entire cognitive distribution, the values we would want in an educated citizenry.

But what do we want to
do?
What courses should be required of educated persons? Do we want to have separate schools for the gifted and average student? Tracking systems? A national Great Books curriculum?

We will say it again: Different parents will want to make different choices for their children. We are not wise enough—and neither are any of our colleagues wise enough, nor is the federal government wise enough—to prescribe for them what is best for their children. The goal of developing educated persons, like the goal of improving American education in general, will best be served by letting parents and local communities make those choices.

Educated, Not Credentialed

If we have not already made it plain, let us state explicitly that we are proposing a traditional ideal of education, not glorifying academic eredentials. To he an educated person as we use the term will ordinarily entail getting a degree, but that is incidental. Credentialism—unnecessarily limiting access to jobs to people with certain licenses and degrees—is part of the problem, not a solution. Because academic credentials are so overvalued, America shies away from accepting that many people have academic limitations—hence, the dumbing down that holds back the brightest youngsters.

But parents and communities must turn to educators to implement their hopes for their children, and here is the problem: Too few
educators
are comfortable with the idea of the educated person. A century ago the notion of an educated person was an expression of a shared understanding, not of legal requirements. That understanding arose because people were at ease with intellectual standards, with rigor, with a recognition that people differ in their capacities. The criterion for being an educated person did not have to be compromised to include the supposition that everyone could meet it. The concept of the educated person has been out of fashion with the people who run elementary and secondary schools and, for that matter, with too many of the people who run universities.

Our policy goal? That educators who read these words change their minds. It is a reform that is at once impossible to legislate but requires no money at all. It a reform that would not jeopardize the educational advances of the average student. All that we ask is that educational leaders rededicate themselves to the duty that was once at the heart of their calling, to demand much from those fortunate students to whom much has been given.

Affirmative action on the campus needs, at last, to be discussed as it is actually practiced, not as the rhetoric portrays it. Our own efforts to assemble data on a secretive process lead us to conclude that affirmative action as it is practiced cannot survive public scrutiny.

The edge given to minority applicants to college and graduate school is not a nod in their favor in the case of a close call but an extremely large advantage that puts black and Latino candidates in a separate admissions competition. On elite campuses, the average black freshman is in the region of the 10th to 15th percentile of the distribution of cognitive ability among white freshman. Nationwide, the gap seems to be at least that large, perhaps larger. The gap does not diminish in graduate school. If anything, it may be larger.

In the world of college admissions, Asians are a conspicuously unprotected minority. At the elite schools, they suffer a modest penalty, with the average Asian freshman being at about the 60th percentile of the white cognitive ability distribution. Our data from state universities are too sparse to draw conclusions. In all the available cases, the difference between white and Asian distributions is small (either plus or minus) compared to the large differences separating blacks and Latinos from whites.

The edge given to minority candidates could be more easily defended if the competition were between disadvantaged minority youths and privileged white youths. But nearly as large a cognitive difference separates disadvantaged black freshmen from disadvantaged white freshmen. Still more difficult to defend, blacks from affluent socioeconomic backgrounds are given a substantial edge over disadvantaged whites.

There is no question that affirmative action has “worked,” in the sense that it has put more blacks and Latinos on college campuses than would otherwise have been there. But this success must be measured against costs. When students look around them, they see that blacks and Latinos constitute small proportions
of the student population but high proportions of the students doing poorly in school. The psychological consequences of this disparity may be part of the explanation for the increasing racial animosity and the high black dropout rates that have troubled American campuses. In society at large, a college degree does not have the same meaning for a minority graduate and a white one, with consequences that reverberate in the workplace and continue throughout life.

It is time to return to the original intentions of affirmative action: to cast a wider net, to give preference to members of disadvantaged groups, whatever their skin color, when qualifications are similar. Such a change would accord more closely with the logic underlying affirmative action, with the needs of today’s students of all ethnic groups, and with progress toward a healthy multiracial society.

W
e come to national policies that require people to treat groups differently under the law. Affirmative action began to be woven into American employment and educational practices in the 1960s as universities and employers intensified their recruiting of blacks—initially on their own, then in compliance with a widening body of court decisions and laws. By the early 1970s, affirmative action had been expanded beyond blacks to include women, Latinos, and the disabled. It also became more aggressive. Targets, guidelines, and de facto quotas
¹
evolved as universities and employers discovered that the equality of outcome that people sought was not to be had from traditional recruiting methods. As it became more aggressive, affirmative action became correspondingly more controversial.

Affirmative action creates antagonism partly because it affects the distribution of scarce goods—university places, scholarships, job offers, and promotions—that people prize. But it is also problematic for reasons that reach into deeply held beliefs—most fundamentally, beliefs about the ideal of equal opportunity versus the reality of the historical experience of certain groups, preeminently blacks, in this country. As the rhetoric heats up, the arguments about affirmative action become blurred. Affirmative action raises different questions in different contexts. What, people ask, are the proper goals of affirmative action, the proper methods? Which groups are to be benefited? What are the costs of affirmative action, and who should bear them? Is affirmative action
a temporary expedient to correct past wrongs, or must the American ideal of individualism be permanently modified for the collective needs of members of certain groups?

Affirmative action is part of this book because it has been based on the explicit assumption that ethnic groups do not differ in the abilities that contribute to success in school and the workplace—or, at any rate, there are no differences that cannot be made up with a few remedial courses or a few months on the job. Much of this book has been given over to the many ways in which that assumption is wrong. The implications have to be discussed, and that is the purpose of this chapter and the next, augmented by an appendix on the evolution of affirmative action regulations (Appendix 7). Together, these materials constitute a longer discussion than we devote to any other policy issue, for two reasons. First, we are making a case that contradicts a received wisdom embedded in an intellectual consensus, federal legislation, and Supreme Court jurisprudence. If the task is to be attempted at all, it must be done thoroughly. Second, we believe affirmative action to be one of the most far-reaching domestic issues of our time—not measured in its immediate effects, but in its deep and pervasive impact on America’s understanding of what is just and unjust, how a pluralist society should be organized, and what America is supposed to stand for.