Lowering the National IQ

In recent years, reading, math, science, and other scores have been plummeting in America. Schools are not teaching students to read, to do math, to understand the scientific method, or to think critically. Because some races poll lower than the average in accomplishment, and some poll higher than the average, teachers and school boards around the country are dumbing down teaching and testing so that no one fails. This allows the failures to feel good about themselves and angers the overachievers because they are being dumbed down, too. They recognize they are being done no favors with a slack-off curriculum.

It is beyond infuriating that our once-proud public school system cannot now graduate competent people. Many can’t even read. But they certainly graduate students who feel good about themselves, which is all that matters to the leftist educationistas. Making students actually be made to work hard toward a goal is too white privilege-y, too entitled. As a result, at least two generations of public school and college students graduate knowing nothing of value. By “value” I mean how to support themselves, how to contribute to the culture, how to build things, how to delay gratification, or how to create things that matter. Instead, we’ve got the Pride Generations, two of them, who are quite proud of themselves for being trans or gay, or straight and unaccomplished, or binary with pronouns, which seems to be inordinately important to them. These intellectual ciphers will become drains on the producers and will continue to be a disfiguring scar on the face of our country.

Charles Murray, who wrote not only The Bell Curve, but also the recent Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America, showed with flawless statistical analysis, observation, and study that,

[t]he charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.

“Cognitive ability” means I.Q. Uncomfortable as some people find I.Q. differences among the races, they are nevertheless there. But for some readers, there is a surprise here: Murray posits that I.Q. differences (low I.Q. in this case) can be made to disappear when educational differences, cultural differences, and family dynamics change. For example, broken families typically produce children with lower I.Q.s. According to Murray, black cultural, not cognitive, differences account for lowered I.Q., where the black culture being examined does not emphasize learning and where crime is an ever-present consideration. In short, black kids can raise their I.Q.s by their parents removing them from the stereotypical black rap cultures.

What American education is doing instead of preaching that the black culture should clean up its act is saying to be proud of the black culture with its rap profanity, its high crime rate, its glitzy fame-seeking, its unwed motherhood, its one-parent families, and its emphasis on Being Black rather than on being competent.

America’s schools and colleges, by not demanding excellence and by teaching courses geared to racial/sex differences, is lowering the national I.Q. not just for blacks, but for whites, Asians, Indians, and everyone else. It is a classically liberal mindset: rather than raise the bar to encourage excellence, they lower it to the lowest achievers, believing that excellence and merit are too “white.” Thanks to people like Kendi and Hannah-Jones, youngsters are growing up believing that black is all that matters and white not only is demonic and genetically racist, with no hope of redemption, but also needs to pay up. Big.

This criminally negligent educating crushes the intellect. Most people, with few exceptions, can learn what is taught by competent teachers, but when the teachers teach grievance, privilege, sexual deviancy, and victimhood and do not hold students to high academic standards, they lower America’s I.Q. You cannot be a genuinely productive human being when all you care about is victimhood and grievance. Demanding virtue of others while eschewing it yourself is not a recipe for success. Low-I.Q. families have a choice that does not involve reparations; it involves love of their children and their promise, a love of God, a love of education, and a love of that which edifies.

We have a nation of low-I.Q. incompetents of all colors, and it must change by getting back to educating for success and contribution.

A final thought: Educating for individual success is a good thing, but altruism in education is fatal. You cannot raise I.Q. by telling children and young adults that they are wonderful “just the way they are.” That lowers the bar even more and kills incentive.