One of the hottest buttons around is discussion of racial-genetic disparities in IQ, or cognitive ability, or general intelligence (“g”). TCS Daily (technology, commerce, society — a truly techie, even geek-like thing to call a blog — tries it out with “Race, IQ, and Education,” by Arnold Kling.
He opens with an anecdote that would be familiar or evocative of the familiar for many public school parents in Oak Park and elsewhere:
In the 1990’s, when my daughter was in middle school, her principal created a remedial math class for a handful of students. All of them turned out to be African-American. The local chapter of the NAACP took offense, and the principal was dismissed.
Yes. Our first principal, for our first first-grader in 1977, was careful to sprinkle black kids among several classes, for integration’s sake. A few years later, he tried to reverse this, proposing to move kids together in core subjects according to achievement but gave it up in the face of teachers’ revolt, I was told, privately and credibly, the new superintendent.
Arnold Kling’s much later incident “helps to illustrate the three contentious issues caught up in the IQ-race controversy,” he writes:
1. Is there such a thing as innate cognitive ability?
2. Is there such a thing as race?
3. Is there a difference among races in average cognitive ability?
There we have it, a bold move into the minefield. He continues:
As I see it, there are four approaches for dealing with these issues. The approaches are: segregationism; denialism; compensationism; and individualism.
Read the rest if you’re interested.
Blithe Spirit 