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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
A Quite Interesting Read Aug 07, 2010
Firstly, I am rating this book based upon the QUALITY of the argument (was it coherent, logical, etc). Therefore, I am not personally writing that I AGREE with the argument, or at least with certain sub-points of the arguments.
Below, I list some of the major points that Charles Murray conveys in each chapter and the major ideas that binds them together.
Major Premise: The Education System is living a lie (i.e. that every child can be everything he or she wants to be).
Chapter 1: Ability Varies
Abilities vary by genes and environment.
Seven intelligences:
- Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence
- Musical intelligence
- Interpersonal intelligence
- Intrapersonal intelligence
- Spatial intelligence
- Logical-mathematical intelligence
- Linguistic intelligence
Many of the things that high-ability students can do are different in kind from the things that low-ability students can do. That's a fact and the design of every aspect of education needs to keep it in mind.
The truth that people may possess many different abilities is unthinkingly transmuted into an untruth: that everyone is good at something, and that educators can use that something to make up for other deficits.
Chapter 2: Half of the Children Are Below Average
The proposition on the table is that our best educational experiences were ones in which adults insisted we could do better when in fact we could do better; our worst educational experiences were ones in which adults insisted we could do better when in fact we could not do better.
Family background was far and away the most important factor in determining student achievement.
The real advantages of private and charter schools lies elsewhere - in the safe and orderly learning environments they offer their students (no small benefit), and in curricula that typically provide more substance in subjects like history, geography, literature, and civics than the curriculum offered by the typical public school.
Chapter 3: Too Many People Are Going to College
If surviving to a diploma is the definition of "cope with college-level material," then almost anyone can do it if he shops for easy courses in an easy major at an easy college.
So few can do well in real colleges because real college-level material is hard.
Many college students lack adequate vocabulary skills. Only 10 percent of students should be going off to college.
Memorizing things is an indispensable part of education and memorizing is something that children do much, much better than adults.
The Aristotelian Principle: "Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity."
With more than a third of twenty-three-year-olds now getting a BA, many employers can reasonably limit their hiring pool to college graduates because bright and ambitious high school graduates who can go to college usually do go to college.
p. 93 *Interesting example about why someone might not be better off going to college.
The income for the top people in a wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that require a BA.
You want a job you can be good at.
Students must also accept that whether they try hard is not the point, but whether they get the job done.
If everyone else is giving out nothing but As and Bs, graduate schools and employers interpret Cs as the equivalent of a failing grade. There's no way for the professor to put on the transcript, "I grade the old-fashioned way. C represents average work."
Class society - We have made something that is still inaccessible to a majority of the population - the BA - intro a symbol of first-class citizenship.
Today, if you do not get a BA, many people assume it is because you are too dumb or too lazy.
Chapter 4: America's Future Depends of How We Educate the Academically Gifted
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
What does it mean to live a good human life? Start with Aristotle and the four cardinal virtues, approximately translated as temperance, courage, practical wisdom, and justice.
practice habit virtue
Education of the gifted
- Rigor in Verbal Expression
- Rigor in Forming Judgments
- Evaluating the data
- Recognizing patterns
- Rigor in Thinking about Virtue & and the Good
- Humility
Chapter 5: Letting Change Happen
Making public schools better:
- Disruptive students are not permitted to remain in class.
- Students who are chronically disruptive are suspended.
- Students who in any way threaten a teacher verbally or physically are expelled.
Bad students: Many of them are already on the street for all but a few hours of the day when they are preventing teachers from teaching and other students from learning.
Politicians are pro-choice for their own children but not for other peoples' children.
Need more certification exams employers to hire based on knowledge rather than where a student went to college.
Even a large number of very bright students can be lazy - not challenge themselves to be their very best.
A college can keep any undergraduate busy for four years without coming close to exhausting the body of work that is great beyond dispute.
The meaning of life is on the mind of just about every college sophomore.
"Be All You Can Be." Note: the key word is CAN.
Students will have succeeded if they discover what they love doing and learn how to do it well.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 thought provoking read! Jul 20, 2010
Very thought provoking! His claims seem to be well founded, and would revolutionize education in America.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
From a 22 Year Old Who Hates School Jun 16, 2010
This is one of those books that can change your life, I think, or at least, change the way you look at education, the system, and the way we put merit on things. I disagree with him on exams, I failed math in the SAT's and barely passed the MCAS, but I'm excellent in the stock market, and I've been a businessman since I was four years old and buying and selling candy for a dime on the penny.
This book to me is not elitist. I don't feel it is at least. I don't see him saying that those who wouldn't go to college or weren't cut out for college are to be the worker bees for those who are. That's elitism. My heroes were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and in some part, Jay Gould, I don't believe any of these men finished grade school, let alone went to college. I used to watch Ducktails when I was little, which, mind you, Scrooge McDuck has no college education either. I think college is horribly overrated, a need for a college degree had initially made me consider wasting my time so I could get the job I wanted. I am getting an associates degree because my mother won't accept college isn't important. I have made a little more or a little less depending on the market than 200,000 dollars in the last four years, by only adding 2,000 dollars a year since I was 18. I also have invested in private companies and have seen returns on those. I could live very well and make a good living right this instant. I'll be a millionaire before I'm 26. I'll have an associates degree and still won't qualify for the job I wanted. But that's fine you know, because it might have taken away from me doing what I'm doing so effectively.
This is America people, what we need to be teaching the kids of this generation is how to take their ideas, take their wants and desires, and make them into realities, that's what we have to do.
This book, I believe should be given to every school board member, every Governor, every Senator, every congressman, and every president, and maybe, just maybe, America can stop its slide down to becoming a second class power.
A Common Sense Approach to US's Educational Problems Jun 09, 2010
This book is a no-nonsense approach to the nations educational problems. His basic principles are either self-evident or common-sense, when considered thoughtfully. His findings are typically well-backed up by statistics and it is clear that he is thoughtfully considered not only about what education should look like in America, but also what is possible considering the cultural and political realities. I would highly recommend this book to anyone concerned about the nation's educational system, which ought to include any educator, college student, or parent.
A COMMON MISCONCEPTION IS THAT SCHOOLING EQUATES TO EDUCATION Feb 27, 2010
I originally posted this as a comment on another review, but decided it it more appropriate standing alone.
Schools are not a place to automatically get an education. They have become institutionized baby sitters. Evidence? As the need for hands on the farm decreased the school year grew longer. Thomas Carlyle wrote, and I quote from memory: "The only real education is a good library." (Of course the books must be the right ones, and be read and understood.) This is still true. It follows that the most important funciton of primary schools is to teach reading. As for leading a "horse" to "drink of books," that is problematical. When I attended school many years ago, an interest in reading was encouraged by the teacher reading to the class. If what was read, was well selected, it worked pretty well. I cannot recall that in those days there was much evidence that "Johnny Couldn't Read."
Consider a great money-saving device: grant anyone who applies for testing a general educational development test and if they pass in the upper quartile - or perhaps even the upper half - of test scores where they are matched against test scores of college graduates, confer a degree in general education granted by the U.S Dept. of Education. I, a high school dropout, took the U.S. Armed Forces Institute's General Educational Development tests on which scores were matched only against those who were moving on to junior college level, I, an avid reader, scored percentiles of 91, 93, 98 and 99. Those who passed were granted a two year college equivalency on their military records.
I conjecture that the reason the test wasn't based on the scores of graduates was because so-called "educators" feared the result might put many of them out of their jobs in a sheltered employment field. (We've all heard of courses in mud pies and underwater basked weaving, many of which are required subjects.)
An article in a publication of the Air Univesity many years back was titled: "Education and Jobs: the Great Training Robbery." Its point was that in practice, when an industry moved its base and new trainees were needed at the new location, the average additional training needed to meet the industry's standards required was found to be only six to eight weeks to adequately train replacements for the employees who chose not to move with their employer.
There was and still is an absolute fixation with the idea that college trainees make better candidates for 'any' job. When reality moved in it was discovered that, (contrary to the accepted wisdom) when college grads were hired, they were over qualified, and left to get better jobs as soon as the opportunity presented itself, and all the industry got for their money was temporary hires, and in the bargain lost their training money.
Today, if the government, which seems wedded to the same erroneous notion, accepted the money-saving potential that could be gained from adopting the idea behind general education degrees and granted them based on competitive examinations, a substantial part of the money spend on subsidizing higher education at this time, could be saved and the need for the high tax base for so-called education would be greatly reduced. A bonus would be the saving of millions of hours squandered on four years of classroom fiddling.
I rest my case except to say that in the two years before I dropped out of high school I skipped school to go the the library and read (predominately history and biography). In case anyone thinks I dropped out due to low grades; I won a high school wide contest on excellence in history given by the Daughters of the American Revolution with a score so high out of 150 questions that second and third didn't come close. A sad fact was that I had to be given a waiver sought by my history teacher to take the test since only B students and above were eligible. (A misconception still common was that good grades invariably indicate superior knowledge.) My good old teacher realized that she'd used low grades as my punishment for sleeping in class and never turning in a page of homework. She had punished me with C's for A-plus work and disqualified her fastest horse. It is still a common practice to give A's for conformity, not knowledge, with the result that fanny-tupping mediocrities can also get A grades.
As for discussion of "averages," an average is an average in any set of numbers, whether in tens, hundreds, thousands or millions - we didn't invent the bell curve, we discovered it as a fact of nature. Further, the apparent notion of being able to teach brains is still implicit in college catalogs. I question that inherent traits such as intelligence can be altered by environments.
Glenn G. Boyer
Read my book "Where The Heart Was" to get a full appreciation of those "good old" days. It's purpose as I state on the first page is "to re-invoke the soul of the republic." read its reviews on Amazon. i am also recognized world-wide as the foremost authority in an area of history. See my "I Married Wyatt Earp" as an example, on Amazon. It has been in print for 33 years, was published by a university press, and consistently was rated in the top one percent of best sellers on amazon until it was temporarily taken out of print pending a revised edition.
I probably would have been selected as least likely to succeed by my peers, but have managed to get a dozen or so books published by major publishers and reprinted in both the U.S. and England.
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