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Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve fame) has written a series of articles for the Wall Street Journal on intelligence (available free here). One frustrating aspect of the articles is that Murray doesn’t cite his sources. Consider this statement:

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Is Murray really suggesting that we shouldn’t bother to teach children of average ability how to read and write effectively? Murray later claims that only small, “temporary” increases in IQ are possible, and that poor performance of many schools is due primarily to low IQ in their student population. But there’s more:

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Help create a reading list for Charles Murray [Cognitive Daily]

Originally from ScienceBlogs Channel : Brain & Behavior by Dave Munger none@example.com