New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon interviewed Charles Murray (Real Education), and they disagreed on some things:
DS: Europeans have historically defined themselves through inherited traits and titles, but isn’t America a country where we are supposed to define ourselves through acts of will?CM: I wonder if there is a single, solitary, real-live public-school teacher who agrees with the proposition that it’s all a matter of will. To me, the fact that ability varies — and varies in ways that are impossible to change — is a fact that we learn in first grade.
DS: I believe that given the opportunity, most people could do most anything.
CM: You’re out of touch with reality in that regard.
John Derbyshire recalls his own experience teaching
The stories we heard from the school nurse (who went to boys’ homes) and the local police station’s Juvenile Liaison Officer (frequently at the school) were grim. Was it really the case, in prosperous late-1960s England, that a father would supplement the family’s supply of firewood by removing alternate boards from the stairs? Or that a twelve-year-old boy should not know the function of toilet paper? My colleagues, the nurse, and our policeman, assured me that such things were quite normal.
Though rough, the boys were surprisingly easy to handle. In part this was because, as my colleagues said bluntly, they were so slow-witted, it was easy to outfox them. They were given tests every year, including a frank IQ test, on which most scored in the 70s or low 80s. There was nothing wrong with any of them, and many were cheerful and pleasant boys, but there was no mistaking the fact of their being … dim. Dimness also helped weed out the really hard cases, who would embark on a criminal career at age 13 or 14. Too clueless to evade detection, they would be caught at once and whisked off to Juvenile Hall to be someone else’s problem.
Why were they so dim, though? We discussed this endlessly in the staff room. A young idealist, I very much wanted it to be nurture. Such awful environments! And missing so much primary schooling, as most of them had! My colleagues — dedicated men all, and a couple of them close to saintly in their determination to find what could be found in these lads, and to do what could be done for them — were pretty solidly for nature. In the pungent Liverpool manner, the topic was discussed as: “Does the pig make the sty; or the sty, the pig?”
It was depressing work, with little to show for months of effort. Perhaps the most depressing thing of all was that none of the boys was very capable at anything. To play soccer, for example, needs a modicum of thought as well as some minimal physical fitness. Our boys could not rise to it. The masters-boys soccer match was a rout of them, strapping 15- and 16-year-olds, by us, wheezy desk-wallahs with a median age around 40. Up to that point I had assumed that even seriously un-intellectual people must have some ability at something. That this is not necessarily the case, is one of the saddest true things I ever learned.
Charles Murray is right. Ability varies, and not much can be done to change it.