Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a system of education that actually prepared everyone for happy and productive lives? Instead, we try to stuff everyone into procrustean k-12 model and wonder why we have so many "failures". Worse, we tell every high school graduate to go to college and too many college graduates end up at jobs at benefit not a bit from their expensive post high school education and the student often has a big chunk of debt to pay back. Why are we doing this to ourselves and our children? Who benefits from this present mess? As parents and taxpayers, we have to get the gumption to take back our educational system from the politicians and those who control our present system (and, no, it isn't the local school boards or the citizens). This terrific book by Charles Murray makes four basic points. 1) Ability varies. You know this is true. Some people are good at sports. Some people are better at math. Others have strong verbal acuity and so forth. Murray examines the multiple-intelligence (seven intelligence) model and discusses the "g" measured in IQ tests, as well. The point is, if talents vary widely, our current system tries to adjust this necessary outcome by holding back the most talented rather than letting them zoom ahead, and it places burdens on the least talented that discourage them and keep them from becoming prepared for life with skills that can help them in jobs that can contribute to a happy and constructive life. 2) Half of the children are below average. No, we don't live in Lake Woebegon and no one really does. If you line up people by height, half of the children will be below average. If you have them run around the track, half of their times will be below average. If you have them perform math problems, write essays, make drawings, or play musical instruments, the range will run from the truly gifted in each to those who don't seem to understand the subject at all. And, yes, half will be below average. This is simply true. But it has strong implications of how your should set up an educational system. You cannot put the best basketball players and those who can barely stand on the same varsity basketball team and expect it to function let alone win. The same is true for every subject. The word segregation is radioactive so lets use differentiate. You may need to differentiate students to different schools based on talents, interests, and accomplishment in order to truly educate the students. An education is supposed to lift students from where they are to a better place in life. Not everyone is going to learn advanced calculus, but those that can should be given the best education to learn it and more. Each subject should be treated the same way. 3) Too many people are going to college. The issue is not that people aren't learning things in college; but that many of the kinds of remedial skills and core subjects now being taught in many undergraduate programs should be pushed back

Some books deserve 5 stars not because they are right on every score or because they will convince all readers, but because they explore a hidden other side to a seemingly one sided issue. Charles Murray's "Real Education" is one such book. It will not change everyone's mind. What it will do is make everyone (agreers and disagreers) take a long, hard think. Murray's main point is a simple one: we need to be real about what we expect from students, especially those in the bottom percentiles. While the present age's mantra is that one size - the "college track" - fits (or SHOULD fit) all, the data has never bourne this out. While very modest gains in ability are possible with much effort, all the attempts to "leave no child behind" do exactly that, often by asking square pegs (underperforming students) to fit into round holes (the college-prep track). Murray shows us the numbers - including those from Head Start and NCLB - to back up the idea that, like it or not, some students are less ACADEMICALLY gifted than others by nature. One hard truth that Charles Murray focuses on is that while trying to send all kids down the college path sounds good on the surface, it may not be the most reality-based approach. High schools need to recognize that it is alright to steer students towards vocations, two year colleges, and trades. Murray also criticizes colleges for mandating that all students - no matter whether they aspire to be a lawyer or an HR manager - go through four years of liberal arts classes that may be irrelevant to their career-track. (Does the latter really need to take philosophy?) All of this might seem a bit pessimistic and will surely rub people the wrong way. As a special educator that deals mostly with the underperformers, I can attest that every teacher I work with knows that, try as we may, some students will never be college material. (As one put it to me, it is not a God-given right to be able to understand algebra.) Murray's point is that the sooner we recognize that one size and ability level does not fit all, the sooner we can figure out how to design an educaiton program that fits everyone's needs, rather than fitting all students to our needs. (Despite our best intentions, half of kids will be below average and 10% will be in the bottom tenth.) The only real criticisms that I have are that so much of the book focuses on proving that the problem exists that only a small portion - 1 chapter - is focused on soluitons. And, while some of the proposals are sensible, some are chimerical. (Do you really think that there will be a push to replace the BA degree with career-tailored certification programs any time soon?) Overall, though, there is so much (should be) common sense running through this book that I found myself grinning while reading it. As a teacher, I am always afraid that admitting that variation in scholastic potential exists would consign some of my stduents to failure (and arouse the ire of administrators). Mu

Leave it to Mr. Murray to wade into the "special-interest-laden" waters of the educational bureaucracy/establishment and present facts. Mr. Murray has written a book that is maddening on the one hand ("facts are pesky things"), and reassuring on the other. Maddening to the extent of what K-12 education has become,or more correctly, devolved. And Murray takes all comers---including the self-esteem police and the grade-inflating universities. The problems he defines---all created by people with good intentions, no doubt, are fixable but sadly probably not by our current crop of elite educational leaders. Murray concludes on an optimistic note, and not a moment too soon. I have seen anecdotal (my children are through college---those that wanted to go), evidence of Murray's conclusions; many problems are being solved in innovative ways by parents and local communities. His advocacy of expanded vocational HS paths and innovative methods of learning (beyond the campus) are insightful---but so are Murray's admonishment to get back to a "core" curriculum that emphasizes what it means to be human. (By the way, his comparison of Aristotle and Confucius on page 122 is spot-on!). Murray illuminates the one element that is absent in today's public school setting; the lack of moral instruction. He says, "...the reigning ethical doctrine of contemporary academia: nonjudgmentalism. They have been taught not just that they should be tolerant of different ways of living, but that it is wrong to make judgements about relative merit of different ways of living. It is the inverse of rigor in thinking about virtue and the Good---a task that, above all else, requires the formation of considered judgements." Just as his monumental work Losing Ground was used to begin the dismantlement of the welfare state, this book would be a good guide for parents, educators, and leaders to begin asking important questions about how our education dollars are being spent, and what our society gets in return. A very important book and highly recommended!!

American education is dominated by wishful thinking. Murray calls for changing the way schools do business, and the way we define educational success. We approach education as if every child can be anything he or she wants; we are phobic about saying that children differ in their ability to learn school material. This includes "No Child Left Behind" - a conservative fantasy. Belief that everyone who wants (now 64% of U.S. college-freshman-age, vs. 11% in China - National Geographic) should be able to attend college is its liberal counterpart. Occupations for which "knowing enough" requires 32 courses (standard college fare) are quite rare - Murray suggests they are limited to medicine and law involving one year of preparation and 3 years of actual medicine and law. (I'd add engineering.) Most occupations take over four years to acquire competence, but this is attained mostly via on-the-job experience and training. The rationale for bricks and mortar colleges is falling. More and more books are available on the Internet, colleagueship for faculty and students is available through e-mail, while distance learning has been available for years and now is augmented through the Internet. Earnings data for a B.A. degree are distorted by employers' using it as a screening device - a trend that increases as the number of pupils attend college. The data are also often misread by career-choosers because they don't realize that eg. the range of salaries for a mediocre manager overlap those of an talented electrician - thereby, making the wrong career choice. We need to do a better job of educating the academically gifted. Evaluation of data is one area - it lends itself to teachable techniques and appraisal by explicit standards of validity. Widespread statistical illiteracy among the gifted is a major concern today, witness eg. the paucity of data offered in most articles on global warming. Rigor in verbal expression is another area that needs improvement in the gifted. This talent has declined at the top levels of learning. Finally, pattern recognition is another area Murray recommends increased for increased emphasis among the gifted - history is an essential part of a liberal education. Validation of learning should be increased through certification exams aka a CPA.

Charles Murray has written a brilliant analysis of the shortcomings of current American education, both K-12 and postsecondary. First among the problems he singles out is the pervasiveness of a mind-set he calls "educational romanticism." Educational romanticism takes as realism the Lake Wobegon fantasy, the notion that all children are above average. Consequently, its advocates tell the young, in smarmy Edgar Guest fashion, that there is nothing beyond their ability if only they try hard enough. Murray subtly points out the unintentional cruelty in this practice of encouraging overparted children to repeatedly set themselves up for failure. As an antidote, he suggests we accept the existential truth that schoolchildren are not equal in talents and abilities, that some are more gifted than others in the most important areas for academic futures, language skills and math ability. Such differences, he readily concedes, do not make one necessarily a better person, but they surely make one a better scholar and thus a more logical candidate for university attendance. Second, he argues that half of all children are below average. While he concedes each child should have full opportunity to develop his abilities to the utmost, Murray recognizes that no documentation exists which would support the current educational establishment's wishful thinking that it can significantly alter a student's low ability, whether through more money spent, revised pedagogy, or better teacher training. He is similarly dismissive of the government's and politician's hysterical optimism which has produced such absurdities as "No Child Left Behind." For the improvement of K-12 education, he favors the junking of current "self-esteem" practices and empty encouragements to "creativity,", replacing them with a rigorous core curriculum such as E. D. Hirsch's which imparts lessons in culture and good citizenship. Murray also favors the return of high school tracking, with a revalorization of vocational studies and a return of respect for those frequently skilled students who choose to go into such rather than prepare for college. He is of the opinion that far too many people are pushed toward college these days, and far too often for highly questionable reasons. Murray accepts the idea of an unelected elite, one not dependent on birth or wealth, some of whose members invariably wind up running the country. They are the power brokers in the big corporations, the media, the universities. Most of them are drawn from what he designates as the academically gifted, most of whom have had university training. But even here, Murray presents a caveat. This elite may be smart, but these days neither its members, nor its professors, are usually wise. The best that has been thought and said, given the elective system, is all too often missing from such students' university education. "Rigor in forming judgments," "Rigor in thinking about virtue and the Good" have been replaced by professori