Why Books like “Real Education” Infuriate Me

This is my response to There he goes again in the October Carnival below. People like Charles Murray perpetuate two myths that every teachers should examine in themselves.

The Myth that Poverty = Low Intelligence

I will let the sociologists argue about the inherent racism in poverty or how nutritional deficits and lack of intellectual stimulation in homes without books affects school achievement. I will do what I do best - tell stories.

Meet Dr. Alika Lafontaine, Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, a physician of Métis ancestry from Saskatchewan who was labeled developmentally delayed as a child.

Alika is one story of a prominent person who didn’t allow early labels to limit his achievement but there are lots of stories that don’t make headlines. I taught Adult Upgrading classes in Ontario and Saskatchewan for 20 years and I saw stories like the following repeated over and over in my classroom:

• Young women stressed from looking after younger siblings because mom was working two jobs or incapacitated, who rarely attended school, dropped out at 16 and found themselves raising their own kids on welfare. Imagine the glow on their faces when they tell me they are helping their kids do their homework.
• Children taken into care before they started school who move from foster home to foster home until they end up on the street; many of them functionally illiterate not because they can’t learn but because they never attended school long enough to learn. Imagine them holding a high school graduation certificate.
• Young people of Aboriginal ancestry whose parents hid them in bush camps so they wouldn’t be sent to residential schools. Imagine them writing stories about their experience.
• The young man with a brilliant head for math who drowned his pain over an abusive and impoverished home life in addiction, sobered up in jail and went on to graduate from university.
• The young woman with a childhood IQ of 145 (I saw her assessment) who started hooking at 12 because an older sibling turned her out. She was so brain damaged by drugs at 30 that she could barely read. She became a worker with street people.

At the heart of all these stories is not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of opportunity to learn because of grinding social and economic issues.

The Myth that Lack of University Degree = Low Intelligence

When I taught upgrading, I spent a lot of time with trades people who taught in our vocational stream and I began to see how an 18^th century myth about the lower classes being unintelligent and only capable of manual labor had become linked to a concept that upward mobility = a university degree. So let’s examine that:

• Trades like electrician, plumbing, construction, and mechanic require better math skills than most Arts programs.
• Many of these trades people have higher incomes than university graduates and will continue that trend if they own their own company.
• Several of the people I knew had always planned to teach the trade when the physical labor became too onerous. Many of them had teaching degrees obtained at age 40+.
• We have an extreme shortage in Canada of skilled labor because parents and schools have bought into the myth that whenever possible kids should be channeled towards university degrees.
  

People like Charles Murray use intelligence science to excuse racism and classism in the same way that scientists of a past generation used brain bumps.