Isegoria

Football is a mysterious thing to those not raised in these United States:

I have attended just one football game in my life. It was a college game, and furthermore was in the South, where, if you try out the cliché about college ball being a religion down there, people tell you, without smiling, that it is much more serious than that. What a spectacle that game was! The colors; the chants; the erotic prancing of the cheerleaders; the masked and padded players, their size grotesquely exaggerated, like Polynesian warriors; the guttural war cries; the fenced-off areas of the stands with strange and distinctive populations — one contained nothing but young men in blazers. I felt like an anthropologist watching the Ghost Dance of the Sioux. If a foreigner should tell you that a nation as young as this one has had no time to develop a unique culture, take him to a college football game.

The ferocity of the coaches took John Derbyshire by surprise:

From exposure to the sensitized, feminized, sissified, litigation-whipped culture of the public schools, I had come to suppose that the sterner kinds of pedagogic verbal chastisement had gone the way of switch and tawse. Not here at junior-league football practice. The coaches barked and roared like Marine Corps drill instructors. Inattentive boys had their inattention terminated with great prejudice, often with a set of push-ups or a lap around the field added to drive the point home. When Coach got tired of yelling, the whole team was sent off to do laps, marking pace with military-style antiphons in which the word “kumbaya” seemed not to figure at all. It was wonderful to see, especially from the comfort of a folding chair in the shade, with a cup of iced coffee close at hand.

John Derbyshire confesses to a certain cynical fatalism about his children’s public-school education:

Having beggared ourselves to buy a house in a decent school district, I feel we have done most of what we can do. The kids will learn, or not, according mainly to their own inclinations and abilities. The teachers, when we meet them, seem like decent types, but a child needs to be well-nigh homicidal before the teacher will say anything negative about him.

At our children’s level — intermediate and middle school — education is a caucus race, in which every child is wonderful and all will get prizes. Somewhat later they will take an IQ test (it is called the SAT, but IQ and SAT scores correlate at around the 0.82 level), then be decanted into precisely the appropriate tier of the great American meritocracy as indicated by the result of that test. For the time being, though, everyone is equal and No Child will be Left Behind.

Thus are reconciled two cherished, but unfortunately contradictory, American ideals: the first, that ability should be fully employed and fairly rewarded, and the second, that all are metaphysically equal in ability, the observed differences being mere illusions, most likely arising from some malign intent on the part of the observer.

I sometimes wonder to myself, quietly, what will be the psychological effect on my kids of this faux-egalitarianism. Cynicism, or double-think?

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 boys in England in the 1960s:

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.