I’ll take that bet. you actually test the IQs of a proper statistical cohort of students. you build a grammar school and high school. you tell me who actually learns calculus.

for the latter half of my bet: EVERY BLOODY DAY, we do this, and EVERY BLOODY DAY, we see that it fails to happen for a huge portion of the schools out there. Don’t tell me that all schools are like Baltimore or New Orleans. Look at the above average schools and figure out why even they can’t teach most students calculus.

the fact is, since ed departments REFUSE to test IQ, no one ACTUALLY will take my bet. They just claim they are SURE it’s not true. Well, guys, put your pegagogy where your mouth is.

But let’s get to the core issue: if we find that 5 hours a day of work in math leads the 95 IQ to understand calculus, was that the best use of 5 hours a day? What if it’s only 2 hours? or 6 hours? Is there a number at which you are willing to stake a claim to federal and state intervention? If not, why not?

In education, like everything else, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. There are tradeoffs. Start by figuring out what the metric looks like–how much time and effort necessary to teach child with X skills given Y capability. Then, you could actually decide where on the curve you want to be. Instead, educators act like education the most important thing in the world, but can’t even define how much of it improves skills by X amount. Then they talk about “multiple intelligences” as another way to avoid quantifying that metric. Fine–have multiple metrics. Quantify already.

Murray is overemphasizing IQ, but otherwise he’s right: college should be only for intellectuals who want to spend their life learning, and for training professionals. 13 years of public school should be enough to teach the basics to anyone capable of learning them, and a few months of tech school plus an on-the-job training program should be enough for most jobs. However, it’s never been that way; even when public school standards were high, colleges were still full of kids with little intellectual curiosity and no goals other than to avoid flunking out while they partied on their parents’ money – because the college degree often served not as certification that they’d learned something, but merely as evidence that they came from the middle class.

If Cardinal Fang’s highly selective colleges means the Ivies, then the reason students rarely flunk out of these colleges is not necessary that their students are so good (of course most of them are). Rather in these colleges, gentleman’s C is acceptable, the school does not want to flunk out a Bush or Kerry.

The highly selective colleges are so selective that they rarely end up admitting students who can’t do the work. Students rarely flunk out, and if they do there’s usually some issue other than raw ability.

It looks and sounds good, but even the Germans themselves are not all that keen on that system anymore. Germany’s OECD rankings in education have slipped, according to “The Economist”, in a way that is quite shocking to Germans.

Good to see this sort of thinking in the public dialogue. Distance learning could change the terrain of college education if given a chance. People who might not be “smart enough” from a testable point-of-view could take classes at home, or on-line, to give themselves a chance to “audition” without having to put a long of money at risk. Survey/Introduction classes could be provided in this way, increasing the access to education, but not necessarily increasing the public/private investment in college/university infrastructure to accommodate students who will not complete their studies.