<p><a href=“http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009541[/url]”>http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009541</a></p>
<p>Whether or not you agree with the previous two links about Charles Murray, I think he has some excellent points in this opinion piece.
Isn’t this why so many CC parents seek the most selective/challenging educational opportunities for their kids? Being “smart” by itself is nothing to brag about – it’s what one does with it that counts, imo.</p>
<p>"without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Humility "</p>
<p>But isn’t this the type of teacher that draws complaints from these same parents? </p>
<p>I’ve gone over this point several times on different posts about mean teachers being harsh on “gifted children”, often in the minority. As I said, those who are harsh or mean to you aren’t necessarily an ememy. Those who are “nice” aren’t necessarily what’s best either. </p>
<p>Our first experience with a teacher like this was 6th grade. Her efforts helped my “super duper gifted” S really focus all those brains and work. He thanked her at graduation several years back and knows she played a part in med school.</p>
<p>Although I know many children have natural abilities in certain areas, I hate the whole concept of “giftedness”. IMO, giftedness merely means that whatever area you are gifted in is an area that comes easily to you. That belies the fact that with effort, people can learn and improve even in areas that don’t come easily to them. </p>
<p>My D was an average student until she hit middle school, and then she decided she wanted to be a better student, so she started focusing, putting more work in, made her schoolwork a priority, and she’ll be graduating 15th in a class of over 500, with 4 AP classes on her schedule, a job, extracurricular activities and volunteer work. She’s not gifted with anything, she just put the work in.</p>
<p>Anyway, that’s sort of off-topic, but just something that bugs me. </p>
<p>Charles Murray is a hack, and I don’t think it is always the people at the top of the intellectual ladder who are the movers and shakers of the world. And the U.S. is notoriously anti-intellectual, choosing leaders based on who we’d like to have a beer with, not who has the smarts and the imagination to actually lead us to a better place.</p>
<p>I totally agree with that. I have an old friend who is now a federal judge and many years ago she told me that it was very tough being smarter than almost everyone she had ever met. At the time I thought that was obnoxious in the extreme, but now that my “gifted” middle daughter is a teenager, I’ve come to understand what my friend meant and I agree with her. Some (not all) gifted children (like my daughter) need to learn such things as gratitude, patience, perspective and perseverance. We are working hard on those attributes because without them she will not be a successful and happy person. Finding the perfect high school for her last year was part of our responsibility, as parents, to help Zoosersister achieve her potential intellectually and personally. She’s doing a lot of volunteering this year and I can see much growth. We’re very fortunate that she found a high school program that is very challenging and has huge expectations for its students, not to just be statistically at the top but to push them to the point that they really have to bust their butts. I like that.</p>
<p>The upper eschelon students that the author is talking about live in a world where failure is but a dim possibility given the rampant grade inflation seen at both high schools and selective colleges. Any teacher willing to challenge students which results in a grade distribution similar to a normal distribution will soon be under attack by angry students, parents and alas, even some administrators.</p>
<p>Many parents of these top students go so far as proof reading their papers in hs and college and justify this “help” by using any number of rationals. I know, because I came under a whithering attack here on CC by characterizing such help as crossing an ethical line. Learning from our mistakes is fast becoming a quait idea of long ago.</p>
<p>Perhaps that is why athletics is an important part of growing up. Here there are winners and loosers at the conclusion of every game, meet, and match. And the cailbre of play on the field usually determines the outcome. But even here the stakes are higher than in the past with parents sending their children off to one or more sport camps each summer. These are great for the extraordinarily gifted athlete who can benefit greatly from professional coaching. But for the overwhelming percentage of children it is a way to find them a place on the varsity roster and avoid the disappointment missing the cut.</p>
<p>Then there is the often discussed faux esteem principle and the helicopter parenting phenomenon.</p>
<p>No, i am afraid that most parents do everything in their power to shield their children from failure and perhaps that is a reason that the emotional state of so many is so fragile.</p>
<p>I disagree with Murray. Completely segregating “smart” kids is not the way to go. We all help each other learn. Kids who are not “book smart” can be gifted in other areas and quite creative - and certainly can add to classroom discussions (especially if they’re encouarged by teachers and peers).<br>
I know I’ll get flamed here and some will throw out old sports analogies (would you expect a start quarterback to play with the jv kids?). Well, I think education is a different ballgame. Perhaps those in segregated classes are challenged more by their peers but they lose the ability to hear diverse perspectiives, and the less skilled students miss out on the contributions and help from the “smart kids”. Maybe a mix makes more sense (some integrated and some not). In any case, it’s hard not to sound elitist when you start talking about isolating the “smart” kids …</p>
<p>I don’t think Murray is advocating complete segregation based on intelligence.
I would say that we did follow this line of thinking with our kids – we encouraged them to take the most challenging classes they could, without worrying too much about their grades. My experience has been that kids will rise to the challenge – my kids would probably get the same grade whether the course was college prep, honors or AP.</p>
<p>Segregation of smart kids already happens in many school districts. In my school district, that segregation starts around the 5th grade when kids are allowed to take sixth grade math. It continues in middle school as the more talented and motivated students tend to opt in to schools with challenging curricula. In #8s middle school, she will finish 8th grade having completed geometry and two years of high school Spanish.</p>
<p>In high school, AP/IB and honors courses soon segregate students even more. These classes are packed with very intelligent and very motivated students.</p>
<p>Irishmom: I hear what you’re saying about hard work, and it’s true, of course. Talent tends to be the limiting factor. For instance, I worked my tail off in high school to be the best basketball player I could be, and about all I could do was make the team and play very little. I just wasn’t physically gifted enough for hard work to get me to elite varsity status. My hard work made me one of the top 12 basketball players in my school, but I sure wasn’t going to go any farther, no matter how hard I worked.</p>
<p>For those who say that intelligence isn’t the only factor in sucess: You are right, of course. If you define “success” as making a decent living, then there are many other attributes that are important, and one of the most important may be social skills. But if you are talking about great leaps that benefit all mankind, then that comes from the highly intelligent. I cannot think of such an advance that has not.</p>
<p>I actually think that intelligence and wisdom are two quite different things. Wisdom includes a dose of common sense, which some highly intelligent people may not possess. Some of the zaniest schemes and some of the silliest experiments have been perpetrated by highly intelligent people, and some of the wildest theories have been advanced by them.</p>
<p>marite:</p>
<p>I don’t believe there’s such a thing as “common sense.” Unfortunately, untrained intelligence will build castles in the air based on faulty assumptions. Likewise, an intelligence that starts from a point of revealed truth cannot bring itself to admit uncertainty. Both the tendency to build complex structures on faulty assumptions and the tendency to defend revealed truth are, in fact, not wise. But I don’t believe that have anything to do with common sense. Walk outside. Look around. Is the earth spherical? Common sense will tell you that it’s flat.</p>
<p>I would agree with most of the article, except one has to remember who this Charles Murray is. He is the author of controversial (in my opinion bordering racist) Bell Curve. Now, I think active segregation of “smart” students is a bad thing. But lets be honest, “smart” kids generally hang out together while the not so “smart” hang out together. I think that is enough segregation for now. Because, if you tell a 3rd grader that he/she is smarter than his/her classmate, he/she will have an inflated ego. (There is no doubt about this.) Also, it is imperative for everyone to learn from everyone, thus furthering everyone’s ability to improve this country. More importantly, its not just those with superior itelligence who need to learn to be wise, everyone does. Everyone as Murray so rightly puts it, “must know what it means to be good.”</p>
<p>if you read more of Murray’s "opinions’ he has a way of inserting race into his discussions about IQ, and so when he talks about “separating” according to IQ, he is in a way talking about, in his warped mind, racial segregation…his comments about African Americans and IQ will illustrate his not so hidden agenda</p>
<p>read some of his other stuff…</p>
<p>to paraphrase Murray:</p>
<p>blacks earn less because in general they are less intelligent with lower IQs, thus it isno wonder they earn less (he totally ignores all the other issues that have to do with income)</p>
<p>so whatever he says, I choose to not take with any seriousness, his want to segegrate by IQ/Intelligence is a veiled way of looking for racial divides</p>
<p>FredFred, the bright kids spend enough time as it is waiting for everyone else to catch up or tutoring the other kids in the class. As it is, heterogeneous grouping has resulted in teachers resorting to teaching to the lowest common denominator, not the other way around. So, instead of the bottom rising to the top, the top sits…stagnated.</p>
<p>
Not in my experience. The parents I hang with are thrilled to find the most challenging teacher with the toughest expectations.</p>
<p>The first two paragraphs of the quote are so wonderfully humane, even uplifting. Who’d argue that humility isn’t a wonderful quality to cultivate? But it’s interesting how the next move is to equate intellectual challenge with dissatisfied instructors and experiencing failure . . . . and from there it follows that segregating the bright and not-so-bright is the answer. </p>
<p>Murray’s rhetoric is skilled, indeed, but it’s good to keep track of where he’s headed, to an agenda that gets articulated later in the full piece:</p>
<p>“The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults. . . . . In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty.”</p>
<p>In such a debate as this, I wonder which side the following addresses:</p>
<p>“The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.”
—William Makepeace Thackeray</p>
<p>Or perhaps this, by the great-liberal thinker G B Shaw:
Hamlet’s experience simply could not have happened to a plumber
—George Bernard Shaw</p>
<p>FS:</p>
<p>I’d be very interested in the context of those quotes. They can mean so many different things on so many different levels. Just yesterday, I had someone take a swipe at lawyers with Shakespeare’s quote, “First, kill all the lawyers.” What few realize is that this is what a bad-guy character says when talking about how to overthrow the government.</p>
<p>It’s all in the context.</p>
<p>Any context you can provide?</p>
<p>Tarhunt:</p>
<p>I do think that there is such a thing as commonsense. It can be learned, it is true; and a lot of highly intelligent people never do. And I did not mean the common sense that leads one to conclude that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth. Some of the least commonsensical people I’ve met have been in academia. They think that life is a huge laboratory in which theories ought to apply. So what if some economic theory does not explain why country x,y, or z does not conform to their model? All that matters is the model. That’s why econ departments are not hiring experts on countries such as China or Japan or India. It’s not for lack of funds to do so, but entirely because area-specific knowledge is deemed irrelevant. </p>
<p>I still submit that intelligence and wisdom are quite different things.</p>
<p>I actually had to stop and think about the title. Does it mean that intelligent people have to learn in order to be wise? Doesn’t everybody? Or does it mean that intelligent people…have to learn to be wise? In other words, they’re not necessarily wise?</p>
<p>“superior” intelligence is a strange title actually</p>
<p>who is to judge superior…some tests? </p>
<p>coming from Murray, eh, I know what he is referring to, and it makes me kind of ill</p>
<p>Marite’s and citgirlsmom’s posts so close together highlighted a little unintended irony in Murray’s subtitle: even his critics would concede that he was blessed with superior intelligence; it’s the wisdom part that’s always been in question.</p>