Charles Murray on the fundamental lie of the education system (convo)

this belief that any child can be anything he or she wants to be if they get the right education and the right opportunities i don't think anybody actually believes that it's not a caring and compassionate way to think about children that have very different capacities but nonetheless that's the way we run the educational system [Music] charles murray just casually drop that name on social media and you'll catch heat from strangers that have never read a single word of his work but they're positive that he's evil murray is a harvard trained sociologist who's pumped out reams of careful data-centric humane investigations into some of the most important social trends in modern america what tends to get lost in the hysteria about his work is this murray's radical critique of the education system murray says our schools are living a fundamental lie a lie about the nature of human intelligence a lie fed by people of all political stripes i want to know more about the lie so we travel to his home in small town maryland to ask him about it so dr what is iq iq is a kind of mental agility a quick example there is a subtest and iq test called digits backward and it consists of reciting backwards a list of numbers like six four nine two one and when i am asked to recite those backwards i really have to work at it i have to think sort of mentally there are some people who when they hear those numbers can read them off backward from the image that they have in their mind of that okay that's a mental agility some people have and other people don't it's a really good indication of high visual spatial skills okay it's it's the same as agility in athletics it doesn't indicate merit it's not a matter of human worth it's not virtue it's not compassion it's none of those things it's this capacity that differs across people and the problem is it's become a capacity this mental agility which has acquired enormous economic value over the last century in the year 2021 what is the scientific consensus on the determinants of individual iq genetics is the largest single aspect of it and the manipulable parts of iq meaning the shared environment don't play much rule you should flat out say education system is built on a lie what do you mean by that it is built on this belief that any child can be anything he or she wants to be if they get the right education and the right opportunities i don't think anybody actually believes that about their own kids but it is sort of the thing that people are always saying when they are talking about the improvements in education that can bring all the children above average as in what's the late lamented no child left behind it's it's a lie but nonetheless that's the way we run the educational system so that if you try to say you know what kids have different levels of intellectual ability and that ought to affect our expectations of them and ought to affect the kinds of educations they get to say that is to be guilty of the bigotry of low expectations it's not a caring and compassionate way to think about children that have very different capacities what is the evidence that we have that this romanticism about the ability to boost cognitive ability in kids through formal education is false a lot of it is just simply quantitative where you have kids who are given iq tests at the age of six and you give them the same iq tests at the age of 14. and the correlation between their two their scores are extremely high does anybody ever have radically different scores yeah they do uh in some cases it is just a test artifact that they had a headache the day they took the test the first time and they didn't have the second time but but iq is not perfectly stable over the course of a lifetime but on average over large numbers of people it is and if the question is not does iq ever change but rather do we have programs that will encourage that change and produce it in a significant proportion of the people who get this special program the answer to that is no uh and there have been all sorts of attempts to do exactly that a lot of the ones that have gotten the most attention are preschool you know where they've had uh in very intensive preschool programs for children and lo and behold when they leave the program at the age of five they have shown big improvements on cognitive test scores sometimes but then they all fade out so by the time they are eight or nine you have a very small residual pretty much a trivial residual [Music] did you fall at all the varsity blue scandal where a bunch of these celebrities in california bribed to get their kids yeah colleges right so basically bribing to pretend that your daughter is a water polo star so she can go to usc yeah right or pretend that she's like samoan so she can get into yale or have someone else take the s.a.t for her one of the primary recruitment grounds for that scandal was my old high school in west los angeles which now cost fifty thousand dollars yeah right um i i was wanting to run this by you where a lot of the students at brentwood there's a way in which the parents going through this college admissions process are running up against the raw reality of iq that you diagnose which is you got the 18 year old she lives in a four million dollar mansion in beverly hills her parents spent fifty thousand dollars a year at brentwood they spent ten thousand dollars on kaplan test prep and she just cannot get above a 1200 on the sat she cannot so she's not going to yale they're like running up against this raw reality of what cognitive talent is and how much you could do to actually modify it yeah they tried to find they tried to find some like in and around neurological reality that's kind of what happened yeah but something else that happens is that when they get her in there under false pretenses none of this fairy dust that they want to rub off on her is going to rub off on her yeah what i would say they're asking um the rhetorical question is but okay fine it's not backed up by the science but what's the harm in telling every kid you can be anything you want to be if you just study hard enough oh why why is dr murray crushing their dreams yeah you see that the way you have phrased it is exactly the way the most people phrase it right and how about instead if we stop couching these dreams in terms of you can have a corner office and the skyscraper and be making a million dollars a year let's stop phrasing it in terms of lawyers that's a wonderful thing to be as a lawyer really is that that much fun and what i'm really saying is that we have taken a limited set of occupations and these are the ones that these kids are supposed to aspire to well guess what a whole bunch of kids don't aspire to be those things uh they have a knack for machines and they love fiddling with machines and they would much rather be working with machines out of high school than going on to college i'm thinking about the son of a friend we know plenty smart enough to go to college he loves what he's doing he's getting really really good at what he's doing and fortunately he lives in a family that's not saying to him no no you've got to go to college but the educational system says that politicians say that they supply loans so that kids who have no business going to college either because of their abilities or because of their their interests are seduced into going to college building up huge financial debt and dropping out it's it's a criminal kind of system [Music] goldman sachs does not interview at harvard because it is under any illusion that four years of harvard at harvard have prepared these kids for goldman sachs goldman sachs interviews at harvard because the kids got into harvard and and that is an indication of them there's a lot of raw talent there and once that signal gets noisy because you no longer have a way of discriminating the most talented academically uh harvard is not going to be nearly as attractive to to a lot of employers by the way it's already not nearly as attractive to a bunch of employers uh the ceo of a very famous company that i will not mention uh said we don't even interview at princeton harvard anymore we don't want those kids we're sick of them we we want kids from southeast oklahoma state who've worked hard all their lives and share our values and we're going with them but also the strange thing is the odd fetish put on a select group of white-collar professions particularly in the tony corridors of private school los angeles that i came from i know a lot of people that ascended in one that hierarchical race and they don't actually like the jobs i mean there's a deeper like uh foundational misapprehension of what the good life is and a lot of these you know meritocratic you know somewhat metacratic systems that reward high iq it's kind of a separate point but let's let's uh let's talk about that the number of options that the child of an affluent family is exposed to for a career is in its way as limited as the options an inner city kid has i'm not saying the options are the same i'm saying they're both a very limited set and for the kids in that affluent upper middle class family it's probably one of the professions law medicine or business in which case it's not business entrepreneurial venture capital it's not exciting stuff it's uh the boring stuff and the number of attorneys who have our attorneys because it's a good all-purpose degree and because they didn't have the gumption to get out of uh college after they graduated with their ba are miserable at the age of 39 even though they're pulling down 300 000 a year and uh and should be living the american dream they are the winners they're supposed to be they're supposed to be the winners and a lot of them at that time change their careers the problem in changing your career when you're 39 is it's kind of hard to become really good in another career where you have to serve an apprenticeship right so yeah the the i want to in some way get these privileged kids to understand all the different ways there are making exciting living because there are lots but there's a way in which the lack of education and character or the idea that there could be a thing called the good life that you ought to aim for is tied into the fact that all these cognitive elites go into essentially spiritually hollow professions like being corporate lawyers right those two things are intermittently like intimately the future of the country depends on how we educate the gifted and it's not that i want them to run the country i'm saying that they are going to run the country whether you want them to or not and so we better make sure that we accomplish a couple of things with them one is that they have to be exposed in a rigorous way to ethics to the religion for that matter they have to be exposed to a lot of history rigorously of because history does in fact teach you all sorts of things about how things can go bad if you don't see what has happened in the past that's one set of things rigor first being being forced to not do glib papers that they've scribbled down the night before but master this material they also have to have it drummed into their heads that this thing called iq is a pure unearned gift they did not i don't care whether it's genes or environment either way they did not get smart by trying hard they were born at a moment in history and in a society whether that where this quality had suddenly taken on all sorts of economic value and they should be down on their knees every night thanking god or whatever for this unearned gift right because and when they're like well charles murray is talking about intelligence this is so controversial like how dare this is how dare you talk about it what they don't realize is they only think it's controversial because of a baseline assumption of their worldview which is that intelligence equals yeah moral worth right yeah if you talk so they think you must be saying people if they vary in intelligence they vary in their worth or their ability to live good lives you're like no no no no no that baseline assumption is what's is what's messed up in morality and everything i've written about intelligence starting with uh the bell curve with dick hernstein has said explicitly do not confuse iq with moral worth right uh it's just you know one of the problems here i think is the decline of religiosity and i'm thinking specifically of of of christian theology which has as its central tenet that that god does not judge people by their good works nor by their iq scores that that this is irrelevant to to human worth and it also teaches you to be very humble about your own frailties your own mistakes your own sins and the rest of it there there was built into christians serious christians a an understanding a gut level understanding of of that truth about moral worth and iq just being in separate planets you want your children to understand what is really so great about america and what is so great about america you're going to find in a place like burkittsville or near charles city much more easily than you're going to find it in brentwood and in fact you won't find it in brentwood i submit to you it's really hard for you to see it there because a great deal of what made this country special which is the functioning of local communities and the interaction of different people to solve problems and all that that's alive and well out here it's alive and well in a city the size of frederick which is 75 000 people it's very much a toqvillian american world outside of the big megalopolises i practiced what i preached of or what i believed which is we moved out to here from adams morgan in washington dc knowing that the local schools were rated as mediocre you know not terrible but because it's so much more important to get to know a wide range of kids and not to grow up with these other kids who've also come from just the same background you have and are socialized in the same way and are so insular so is there a god i think so yes in what like defined how by my wife uh a benevolent intelligence well let me back off for a minute and say that my wife was a very active quaker religiously active spiritually active not social activism active uh has over the last 20 years slowly brought me from a quite firmly agnostic point of view to just seeing too many things that make more sense if there is a god literally make more sense in some of the ways that francis collins covers in the language of god and other times where it's really hard to explain how certain things could be otherwise but it's it's never as clear i think with people of faith are there some people who have no doubts who thoroughly define it yeah sure there are with me and i think i share this with my wife too we anthropomorphize god it's it's irresistible to anthropologize god but the fact is that any god worthy of the name is as incomprehensible to us as uh i am to my dog more incomprehensible because my dog has some sense of who i am he doesn't my dog doesn't know what i'm doing when i'm running a regression analysis and and the difference between me running a regression analysis my dog understanding it is minor compared to any genuine god and what we can perceive do you think that there's an afterlife i think that's one of the most interesting aspects of dying that we find out and i won't go to the wall on it i will say that my fear of death is very weak and i think part of the reason it's very weak is that i'm not at all convinced that the lights go out forever i do not know how to express my relative sense of probabilities at this point but i have to say i look forward to death with genuine curiosity uh in that regard one of the things about getting old that i find interesting and unexpected is uh how happy a time it's been really yeah i have i don't know how i don't know whether that's a common experience or not but uh i think it's fair to say my wife and i who've had a very happy marriage for 30 several we're getting close to 40 years but we've never been happier than we are now do you know what accounts for that no happiness in life essentially comes down to two things the first is find your soul mate and a good marriage is as good as it gets and second find something that you really love to do and on both of those counts i have been incredibly blessed would you think about legacy much like your legacy not really and the reason is this i think back to people who a position either similar to mine or actually much more well known than mine think back to somebody like walter lipman early part of the 20th century or actually the first half of the 20th century he was probably america's most famous public intellectual how many people have heard of him now what what did he do what did he write that has had any lasting effect you know i think i have provided some pretty good commentary and analysis of some pretty important things but they're ephemeral and and the problems that i have been dealing with in my work are not going to be very interesting to people 100 years from now i have written only one thing then jointly with my wife that i'm absolutely confident will still be read a thousand years from now and that is a problem yeah our account of the apollo program and i'm confident of that because it is a book that has material about one of the only events of the 20th century that will still be remembered a thousand years from now yeah that this was when human beings first left the earth and so i think that it may only be a few historians that are reading it but that i think is going to last but the rest of it won't oh man it all vanishes into history huh everything is so yeah it's uh that's a bit of a doubter well it's it's also useful um to keep that in mind because it's a proper sense of proportion you know yeah that all of these things that the most successful people in the world are all going to be forgotten within okay you have a general grant you're going to be listen remember for several hundred years but uh so many of the people who occupy huge positions now sick transit gloria mundy right yeah [Music] you

Channel: Good Kid Productions

Views: 100,445

Keywords: Charles Murray, Facing Reality, Education, The Bell Curve, IQ

Id: 9E9Lq50N2BQ

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021