Margaret Wente writes a column for Canada's leading paper,
The Globe and Mail. Hat tip to
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for the link. Today Wente's topic is new
research findings from the U.K. showing primarily the following:
The most significant predictor of how kids will do in school is how their parents did in school. Nothing the education system has tried so far has changed that.
She then explains why, in some detail, based on a study in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology latest issue, go
here to read the abstract.
Their conclusion is both good news and bad news for those who think intelligence is highly overrated. They found that educational achievement does indeed depend on far more traits than just IQ. The bad news: Those traits are highly heritable, too.
It is not polite to say that people differ in their innate abilities, and that there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
And her conclusion:
The trouble with reality is that it tends to be politically incorrect.
More is genetically determined at conception than is later influenced by environment. This makes assortative mating problematic - genetically successful people marry similarly endowed people, and what's worse, genetically unsuccessful people likewise breed with others of limited endowment. We could end up with hereditary classes of very different abilities. Aldous Huxley described this outcome in
Brave New World.
