[Marxism] IQ and race

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ruthless Critic of All that Exists


But other than the USA (where the SAT taking skills may involve some
of these skills), in most other countries there is no incentive for
the teacher to teach students these specific skills that show up in IQ
tests. Do O-levels and A-levels in Britain involve these types of
questions of the kind asked in IQ tests? They do not.

Yet, the author here talks about "results from Europe, from North
America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data
for almost thirty countries."

So, this hypothesis can be ruled out, I think.


^^^^^
CB: I wouldn't rule it out for the US

Do they have multiple choice questions in British schools ?

^^^^^^^^
From the article:

The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of 
the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence 
Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which 
measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the 
categoriesâthose measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the 
ability to do basic arithmeticâhave risen only modestly over time. The big 
gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as âsimilarities,â 
where you get questions such as âIn what way are âdogsâ and ârabbitsâ 
alike?â Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the 
right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American 
would have said that âyou use dogs to hunt rabbits.â

^^^^^
CB: In Britain and other countries, the I.Q. take on similarities between dogs 
and rabbits could become more widely held in the population at large. 

^^^^^

"This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian 
immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for 
example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a 
full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. 
Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As 
you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic 
inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many 
second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed 
endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk 
turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, 
Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. âDid their genes 
begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?â the psychologists Seymour Sarason 
and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. âOr is it 
possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history 
of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which 
permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of 
Americans?â

^^^^
CB: Undifferentiated mass of _white_  Americans ...




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