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December 05, 2006
"Education is basically a series of rent-seeking rackets"
A very good rule of thumb when reading child-development literature is that any study that has not taken careful account of heritable factors--by comparing identical twins raised together or separately, fraternal twins ditto ditto, non-twin siblings ditto ditto--is utterly and completely worthless. That sentence is (a) true, and (b) guaranteed to get you thrown out of a high window if spoken aloud at any gathering of education theorists.
Certainly Mr. Tough will have none of it. The child is a blank slate. Parents act on it, causing this and this. Then teachers act on it, causing that and that. Bingo!--you have a finished adult. Or, as Mr. Tough summarizes the interesting (but perfectly gene-free) work of sociologist Annette Lareau: “[G]ive a child X, and you get Y.” So simple! One wonders if there has ever been an education theorist who has actually raised children, or retained any memory of his own childhood.
. . .
Raising two children in suburban America, I dream fondly but futilely of my own 1950s English childhood, when by far the commonest words I heard from my parents were: “Go out and play. Make sure you’re back in time for supper.” How on earth did civilization survive?
"The Dream Palace of Educational Theorists," by John Derbyshire, New English Review, December 2006
Posted at December 5, 2006 09:47 AM | Categories: Children
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