Working classes 'have lower IQs'

swears

preppy-kei
'Cause it couldn't be the first rate education system we have in this fine country, or anything like that, could it?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Stuff like the diet you eat and amount of mental stimulation you receive as a young kid, hours spent reading vs. hours spent watching TV and that sort of thing probably have a larger effect than what kind of school you go to, though. Every now and then there's something in the news about how big the gaps in kids' abilities and behaviour are even by the time they're in Year 1.

Plus, not every kid from a 'middle class' home is stinking rich and goes to a lah-di-dah fancy school.
 
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swears

preppy-kei
Yeah, but kids from middle-class areas tend to get better state schools, generally.

His whole tone seems to be one of determinism, rather than asking how can we get working class kids achieving academically.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
It's kind of hard to tell from the article what his 'tone' is, since they only actually quote about two complete sentences...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It's kind of hard to tell from the article what his 'tone' is, since they only actually quote about two complete sentences...

Dumbing down in the meedja, innit? Personally, I've got my iStation PodSpace rammed so far up my arse I can't concentrate on anything for more than two... *gets distracted by own belly-button*
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Okay, here's the actual report

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401980&c=1
(link at the bottom right)

Yeah, actually I'm not sure about the tone of it - he could be a lot clearer about whether he's using the word 'meritocratic' to refer specifically to the university admissions procedures or to society as a whole - but essentially what he's saying is that the reason there are lots of middle / upper class kids at top universities isn't because the universities are ignoring bright kids from poor backgrounds, it's because the various inequalities in the education system, social life etc etc etc have already caused an imbalance (in terms of IQ, hmmm, here we go again) by that point, and the relative proportions are entirely consistant with students being selected by IQ regardless of their social class.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
Stuff like the diet you eat and amount of mental stimulation you receive as a young kid, hours spent reading vs. watching TV and that sort of thing probably have a larger effect than what kind of school you go to, though. Every now and then there's something in the news about how big the gaps in kids' abilities and behaviour are even by the time they're in Year 1.

Would you agree that the younger the child the easier it is for them to significantly change their behaviour and general outlook without feeling like they're changing who they are or something like that? I think by the time people think about whether to stay in school after GCSEs or even when they're thinking about sitting them, let alone starting to think about university, kids are fairly aware of what is expected of them, what their place is supposed to be..

I'm sure this ties in with whatever results based on IQ testing were that this chap is talking about. Although I was under the impression that IQ testing had been widely discredited ages ago? Whenever I've looked at one I've thought it was a pretty stupid way of testing 'intelligence'.
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
i don't wish to go over old ground, but the guy is an 'evolutionary psychiatrist', whose research interests in education focus on auditing for universities, he believes that IQ tests measure intelligence and assumes we live in a meritocracy. and he's called bruce.
he can be ignored.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
My old school used Cognitive Ability Tests. They are a pretty reliable way of predicting future performance. If they were useless, they wouldn't be used.

Nearly all schools use some kind of reasoning tests, running parallel with curriculum assessment.

At the 95%+ working-class school I used to work at, the average CAT score was around 90. There were several obviously bright pupils with 130+ scores, who may succeed despite the surrounding mediocrity and their often unhelpful upbringings.

In my experience, high reasoning scores are a very good predictor of good performance at tasks that require novel thinking or abstraction and a good predictor of speed at clerical tasks (for example, completing a 12x12 multiplication grid as quickly as one can).

I have not yet had a pupil in the top-performing quartile of a class with a bottom quartile reasoning score.

Very few parents at the working-class school were aware of private schools and the possibility of promising offspring getting scholarships.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i don't wish to go over old ground, but the guy is an 'evolutionary psychiatrist'

...an area of research disapproved of by left-leaning arts and humanities academics, and therefore...

he can be ignored.

?

(I'm pretty sure they meant 'psychology' not 'psychiatry, but then this is news.bbc.co.uk...)
 
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vimothy

yurp
he can be ignored.

Yeah, and I was amused that The Guardian, when they reported this, contrasted the views of Dr Charlton with the president of the NUS, the general secretary of the UCU, and Bill Rammel, who all obviously have authoritative perspectives on evolutionary psychology.

Anyway, I think that it's a lot more socio-cultural than genetic. That's the only way to explain the mass migration of my parent's generation from poverty to comfortable middle class afluence, IMHO.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
And if they're not up to scratch, you have to kill yourself. We'd see some half-decent GCSE pass rates over here with that approach, I bet.
Yeah, they've tried a pilot scheme in Bridgend. Be interesting to see how that works out.
 
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