The world of education has been divided into two camps for at least a century. In one camp there are the optimists who look at young people and see millions of potential composers, surgeons, or business leaders whose talent is waiting to be unlocked. In the other camp there are the pessimists who look at the same young people and see a largely dull mass among whom only a small minority will ever have the talent to excel. For the first group the big problem is low aspirations; for the second, it's that, if anything, young people's aspirations are too high.
Over the last 50 years the optimists have won most of the big battles. Their argument that widening educational opportunity wasn't just a moral imperative but also good for economic efficiency and social mobility, prevailed over the pessimists' view that widening access to education would merely dumb down the system. So school leaving ages have crept up, and will rise to 18 in Britain by the middle of the next decade. The proportion going to university has also jumped, from barely 3 per cent to over 40 per cent in Britain and much more in some countries (over 70 per cent in South Korea). Education has become one of the few things that politicians believe everyone needs more of.
American political scientist Charles Murray, however, in his new book Real Education (Crown Forum) sees an attachment to "education, education, education" as little more than a romantic fantasy. His latest jeremiad sets out a modern version of the pessimists' case in typically provocative style.
Murray is certainly a man with form. His book Losing Ground, published in 1984, argued that America's "great society" social policies of the 1960s had been not only futile, but also created a permanent underclass. Enormously influential on the American right, it provided perhaps the most important intellectual case for cutting back social programmes. A decade later Murray's ideas on race, class and IQ in The Bell Curve, co-authored with psychologist Richard Herrnstein, proved equally explosive.
Murray has a knack for publicity, but few of his bolder claims have stood up well to analysis. All efforts to find a stable underclass, hostile to work and traditional values, have proved futile. Statisticians, meanwhile, have refuted many of his apparently scientific claims on IQ. But Murray has been smart in raising difficult questions, canny in luring his enemies into untenable positions (like the refusal of many of his critics to accept that genetic inheritance might play some role in explaining social success) and adept at communicating simple ideas to a mass audience through newspapers like the Sunday Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Real Education starts with a familiar Murray trick, using one of the education optimists' favourite texts, Howard Gardner's theory of "multiple intelligences," against them. Gardner argued that there are seven distinct intelligences (he's now added an eighth) ranging from the logical-analytical intelligence that is most valued in schools to others like the kinetic intelligence of sports stars and ballerinas, and the interpersonal intelligence of people who are good at getting on with others. Murray notes that optimists take for granted a wide distribution of skills in sports or music, but pretend that this isn't the case where other intelligences are involved. As a result government programmes like George W Bush's 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, or the policies of the current British government, pretend all can excel academically, a mission as doomed to fail as attempting to make everyone a great athlete or musician.
Murray argues that differential genetic endowments mean that some skills are simply beyond the reach of the many. Almost everyone can learn arithmetic but many can never master calculus (one reason why performance drops off so sharply as teenagers progress through US secondary schools). Almost everyone can learn to sing, but only a handful will ever understand why a composer might choose B major over C major. Encouraging ever more children to stay longer at school and university flies in the face of these unavoidable human limitations.
A typical optimist response argues that, even if ability is widely distributed, everyone can be good at something. Not so, says Murray. Instead, there are correlations between different kinds of intelligence, especially the two that matter most for higher level jobs—logical-analytical and linguistic intelligence. Smart people are often smart at many things, while stupid people are often below average at everything.
His conclusion is simple. Forget the pretence that everyone can succeed academically. Instead, separate and segment children by ability, preferably measured by objective IQ tests. Having done so, help the lower groups to understand their relative strengths and weaknesses, and let them choose suitable career paths—which will usually mean less ambitious ones. And certainly don't fall into the trap of believing that more education is always a good thing. After all, the economy requires low skills as well as high skills, practical skills as well as analytic ones. A good education system should prepare people for the labour market as it is, not an imaginary world in which everyone needs a university degree. Better a university system that concentrates on providing a truly excellent education for the "cognitive elite" whom we need to govern us, rather than a watered down one that tries to do too much for too many.
My guess is that educational optimists and pessimists take sides because of cultural background, rather than poring over the evidence (though Murray's judgment that working-class teenagers are suffering from excessive social expectations may be hard to swallow for anyone who has actually met some). Most traditional conservatives are pessimists—more attuned to human limits and vices than to their virtues and potential. They are also more likely to believe that education is a zero-sum game, in which more attention to the bottom is bound to mean less attention for the cleverest.
These instincts will have been reinforced by the new report by Michael Shayer, professor of applied psychology at King's College London, which shows that the reasoning skills of clever children has fallen over the last 30 years. His study looked at how well 13 and 14 year olds are able to think about abstract scientific concepts, such as density, volume and weight. The proportion able to make sense of issues such as why a pendulum changes speed has fallen. A decline in science teaching may be partly to blame. Or it may be, as Shayer concludes, that teachers no longer stretch the most able.
For Britain's Conservatives these issues are potentially delicate. Many Tories are drawn to Murray's arguments, but a party led by an old Etonian also wants to be seen as having concerns beyond the elite. So the return of grammar schools, vouchers and assisted places will remain off limits, as will any suggestion that university should not be shared more widely. At least on paper, the Tories are committed to going further than Labour in boosting the proportion of school spending in poor areas. For now, even Conservatives want to appear on the side of the optimists.
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The absence of any international comparisons certainly weakens Murray's case. Indeed, at one point he writes that the US has "gone further than any other country in opening admission to the elite to talented people whatever their origins," a comment at odds with a large body of social science (including the OECD's 2008 recent report "Growing Unequal") that shows the US to be a less mobile society than most of Europe or, for that matter, Canada or Australia. His pessimistic conclusions will also be puzzling to anyone aware of Leon Feinstein's work showing that, in Britain, children's class position overrides genetic inheritance before the age of five, as the dim middle class overtake the bright working class. Murray is either unaware of—or simply ignores—inconvenient evidence that appears to leave his argument in tatters.
Worse still, Murray fails to mention what may be the most important recent discovery about intelligence: the Flynn effect. James Flynn, an American political scientist, has repeatedly shown that IQ rates all over the world are rising between 0.3 and 0.7 each year. His research suggests that modern children, bombarded with information, ideas and arguments, have become more skilled at thinking abstractly, and are consequently cleverer. Flynn's work also provides compelling explanations for differences that Murray has previously ascribed to race or class. He has shown, for example, that black Americans reduced the IQ gap with non-Hispanic whites by between five or six points between 1972 and 2002—probably because of changes in their environment, as well as other factors like nutrition.
The implications of Flynn's work are profound. They suggest that if you want a more equal society you have to level up the cultures in which children are raised, a conclusion no less politically challenging than Murray's. Flynn's work is the clearest disproof of the pessimists' claim that ability is inherently fixed in an immutable lump. Murray must know this evidence, but he ignores it.
What then of his claim that young people need to be prepared to fill dull and repetitive roles as well as cognitively challenging ones? To an extent this is true. But any economist would tell him that it's misleading to see jobs as fixed: the distribution of jobs instead adapts to changing supply and demand. More highly educated societies still need people to clean the streets. But high educational levels make some menial tasks more likely to be automated, while others may become more skilled—consider how Starbucks has tried to make the job of serving coffee more complex, and therefore more satisfying.
These flaws in Murray's analysis are not marginal: they go to the heart of his argument. They're matched by equally major flaws in judgment. To take one example, Murray concedes that not all attempts to change the relative life chances of those at the bottom are futile. Improving the worst schools will see their pupils get better results. Investing in help for very young children, like the famous High/Scope Perry programme, in the US, that linked early childhood interventions to lower rates of delinquency and partly inspired Britain's Sure Start programme, will improve their position too. But because the data suggests that they'll move up only one decile on average, Murray concludes that such measures should be counted as failures. My guess is that most social policy experts would be delighted that a single programme could move a child from, say, the 95th to the 85th percentile. After all, at the other end of the spectrum, affluent parents spend tens of thousands of pounds on private schools that achieve a shift of roughly similar proportions.
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These are just a few of the weaknesses of what Murray concedes is a hastily written book. Yet there are, for all that, parts of his argument that cannot be so quickly dismissed. He's right to emphasise the importance of family, and reminds us of one of the world's largest ever studies of school performance, carried out by the eminent sociologist James Coleman for the US government in the mid-1960s. Coleman found, to his surprise, little correlation between school quality and pupil performance. Instead family background was all-important. For Murray this confirms the importance of genetics. Yet he often acknowledges, implicitly at least, that family "culture" might be every bit as important. Certainly, Coleman's study, and many like it, should have had more influence on educational policy, which still overrates what happens in schools and underrates what happens in the home.
Murray is also right to question the wisdom of investing large sums of public money in expanding higher education. Although university degrees still offer good (albeit falling) economic returns, it remains unclear whether the current model of university is good for students themselves or a good investment for society. Many get better jobs because an undergraduate degree is a good proxy for such things as motivation and intelligence, not because of years in lectures, whose content they soon forgot. University education is mutating, as more students start later and combine study with careers. But in retrospect the massive opening up of higher education was remarkably little debated. Whether it really is sensible to invest so much in intensive education in early adulthood—modelled on the type of education previously provided for a very small elite—remains an open question. Today's leaders were themselves university educated, and so tend to assume that it must be a good thing, even if they're often hard-pressed to remember much of what they learned.
Coming from a conservative perspective Murray also makes a broader point, echoing the many progressives who have questioned the privilege given to logical, analytical and linguistic intelligence in education systems. Most schools do little to value other skills, bar a few hours of sports or music, and they do little to cultivate the intrapersonal and interpersonal skills that seem most essential for success in post-industrial economies, as well for living a good life. If we are to have a meritocracy let it at least be pluralistic. There is no good reason why education for everyone should seek to mimic the education that is suitable for the most academically gifted. And there is no reason why we should accept the curse of academic meritocracies, which leave the successful even more pleased with themselves and the less successful even more stigmatised as failures, with only themselves to blame.
Yet when Murray concludes his new book by arguing that we should therefore replace the pretence of equal opportunity with the aspiration to equal dignity for all kinds of work, he is at his most flaky. He has literally nothing to say about how more equal dignity might be achieved. Anyone with even a tiny grasp of how real human societies work will judge it a safe bet that any society which decided to ditch the drive to equal opportunity would be just as ready to ditch the drive to equal dignity.
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On balance it's unlikely that Murray's book will have much influence, either in an America that is swinging to the left, or in Britain where the Conservatives are keen to remain anchored in the middle ground. Murray would like us to believe that the last century's extraordinary opening up of education is coming to an end today. Yet the forces that have driven this revolution in learning are almost certainly not yet spent. They include the pull of an economy that continues to need wider as well as deeper levels of skill, the pull of a democracy that tends to constrain unabashed elitism, as well as the influence of new technologies that reward those with the skills to take advantage.
Murray's Real Education is the sort of book that non-fiction publishers love. It has a simple message. Its topic couldn't be more important. And it will be talked about. But at heart it's a dishonest, and maybe even an immoral, book. It's dishonest not just because of its flagrantly selective use of evidence but also because reading it you would never guess that our societies already spend far more public resources on the cognitive elite than on everyone else. And it's ultimately immoral because, whereas 24 years ago in Losing Ground Murray at least advocated giving people at the bottom a second or third chance, today his perhaps more consistently conservative and pessimistic position, would deny them even that.
