Epic fail

I’d meant to write about something else entirely today, but I’m so angry about this that I need to vent. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/11/genetics-teaching-gove-adviser

Apparently government advisor Dominic Cummings thinks that genetics play a far greater part in a child’s learning ability than any teaching. This is clearly meant to be a justification for dumping on the scrap heap any child who doesn’t achieve enough at a speed the government approves of. Einstein was a late starter. Not everyone blooms at the same pace, and every child deserves a chance no matter what the issues of their background.

What really makes me sick is that, scientifically speaking, this is bullshit. It’s more than twenty years out of date bullshit as well. We’ve been studying intelligence in humans for more than a century. We know, firstly, that intelligence isn’t one thing. There are many different, identifiable forms of intelligence – the physical intelligence of a footballer is very different from the abstract reasoning intelligence of a mathematician, which is different again from the social intelligence of a charismatic leader and so forth. It can take a while to figure out where a person’s strengths are, and current education is geared towards academic thinking. Which intelligence were you talking about, Mr Cummings?

What the current scientific thinking identifies is a range of influences on the development of intelligence. Yes, your genetics are one of those. The culture of your family, what praise and support you get, the culture of your peer group, and to some degree, your educational experience are also in the mix. No, education alone won’t do it AND WE’VE KNOWN THAT FOR AGES. The culture the child is in makes a huge difference so VALUING EDUCATION is a critical part of making a culture that allows people to flourish. We’ve known for a good twenty years that the most critical role of genetic intelligence comes when the environment is deprived. In a stimulating environment, genetic intelligence is less informative of outcomes. In an impoverished environment, genetic qualities really stick out. A few minutes with a search engine will fill you in, if you want more details.

We also know that the single greatest indicator of your likely success in life, is how much money your parents have. Not how clever they are, but how rich they are. The two do not dependably go together (see the royal family, half of America’s ruling elite, and the Tory government for clear evidence that there is no correlation between wealth/power and intelligence). Mr Cummings, it appears may be unable to distinguish between the effects of wealth, and the effects of genetics. Whether this is because he lacks the wit to put it together, or it’s a consequence of serving a political agenda remains to be seen, but either way I hold that such an under-informed, under-read person should not be in any position at all to make pronouncements about education.

I was, for the record, the first person in my immediate line of descent to go to university. This was not due to a blip in family intelligence, but to opportunity. Most of my cousins have also been able to do this. since It was never about the brains, it was about being able to afford to go. Judge me by my ‘genetics’ by the level of formal education my parents or grandparents had, and I’d have been booted out of education at 16 and sent to stack shelves.