Pick Up Real Education: Four Simple Truths For Bringing Americas Schools Back To Reality Published By Charles Murray Shared As Digital Copy

another of my reviews mysteriously deleted without notice, Murray argues "The goal of education is to bring children into adulthood having discovered things they enjoy doing and doing them at the outermost limits of their potential.
The goal applies equally to every child, across the entire range of every ability, " This is not the same as preparing all students to be collegeready, which is the apparent goal of most current educational policy.
This book explores many differences between current and ideal practices and is extremely rich food for thought.
These topics would be of interest to all education administrators, particularly those in secondary and postsecondary settings.


Reading thisbook, after over a decade of serious Ed reform in the state of Indiana was actually pretty interesting.
He doesn't blame schools or teachers for failing to transform society, but rather lays out a pretty logical explanation for reality.
Murray also expands into collegiate territory: why college isn't for everyone, why college isn't about acquiring realworld skills for many jobs/vocations, but my favorite of all is his reference to E.
D. Hirsch Jr. 's Cultural Literacy. As we see a cultural war all around us in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, we realize the necessity of understanding history and how it plays out inn our culture.
Common Core has stripped so much of this cultural knowledge from our public schools, and clearly it is time to bring it back.
I wanted to try something nonfiction so I picked a book about education at random off the library shelves.
While I agreed with some of the truths, there is a condescending tone throughout AND the author consistently talks about how bad inner city schools are.
No sources or anything no anecdotes from inner city students or teachers, Just that they schools are bad but we can't save them all,
I will no longer be picking random nonfiction, I only kept reading out of morbid curiosity, Though some would rather lambast Charles Murray than read one of his works, he present ideas and concepts in this book enough to outlast his critics' rage.
This book was written with the express purpose of blowing away the fog of wishful thinking, euphemism, and wellintended egalitarianism surrounding education in fine, to do away with educational romanticism, or the idea that students can achieve anything, irrespective of personal desires, goals, or innate intelligence.
What a fresh world that would be, should we be able to dispel the haze!

It would be redundant to go into too much depth concerning what the book argues, but, in short, these are Murray's Four Truths about education:

Abilities vary between students, and we must take these into account.
Not all students can meet proficiency standards, no matter how hard we try, and some are simply not interested in the main skills that schools teach mathematicallogical/linguistic skills.


Regardless of how we define "average", half of the students will always fall below it, by necessity.
For many subjects in school, we don't expect students to break through the ground of excellence we don't require everyone to become a skilled athlete, musician, or artist, yet we believe that each student can excel in mathematics and language if given the right pushes and opportunities.
I don't think anyone's experience bears this out, Of course, we should push students to grow and Murray repeats this ad nauseum because he knows his critics will label him a defeatist, elitist, or some combination of such words but we should have different, realistic expectations for growth.
Otherwise, we are hurting not only the system, but teachers and students: teachers, because they feel they have failed in teaching, and students, because they have either failed themselves or have been failed.
And neither should be a necessary byproduct of education,

Too many students are going to college, and therefore our standards in college are almost

nonexistent, which has dragged the worth of a B.
A. nearly to the level of the highschool diploma, Not only is college unnecessary for most people those who would rather develop trade skills, or for those who simply don't have interest in pursuing anything that requires further learning, but when we encourage everyone to go, the standards must decrease to permit everyone entry and continued enrollment, and those that do not attend college feel lesser.
Really, no one profits from this phenomenon not the country, not the colleges, and certainly not the students and their families.


Unequivocally, this assertion is the mosteasily misunderstood: America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.
Realizing this, Murray begins with a large caveat, which I will quote directly: "The proposition is not that America's future should depend on an elite that is educated to run the country, but that, whether we like it or not, American's future does depend on an elite that runs the country.
The members of that elite are drawn overwhelmingly from among the academically gifted, We had better make sure that we do the best possible job of educating them, " This elite expands far beyond CEOs and politicians, to local judges, schoolboard members, and journalists, The elite are those that shape the country, in a combined sense, How do we prepare such people to "lead" The classical definition of education: a truly liberal one an education steeped in the classics of all world traditions, wherein students are compelled to face a host of human questions of the deepest nature.
I'm not sure there's a better form of education,

We can argue the efficacy of such changes, but, concerning their nature, they seem pretty indisputable.
Ability varies, not everyone can hit the same targets, our colleges should not be the only path forward in life, and those that find themselves in leadership positions should be able to consider the Good and Just in all matters, for the good of us all.
Charles Murray really seems to like to take on some of the pressing issues of our times with a sometimes unconventional and almost always unpopular point of view, but one that I feel is unfortunately all too realistic.
He talks about Howard Gardner's seven different types of intelligence: bodilykinesthetic, musical, spatial, linguistic, logicalmathematical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal and how they relate to our ability or perhaps I should say inability to deliver optimum education to all children with a onesizefitsall approach.


"Educational measures such as test scores and grades tend to make differences among schoolchildren look as though they are ones of degree when in reality some of them are differences in kind.
For example, a timed math test limited to problems of addition and subtraction, administered to a random crosssection of fourthgraders, yields scores that place children along a continuum distributed in a shape resembling a bell curve.
These scores appropriately reflect differences in degree: Some fourthgraders can add and subtract faster and more accurately than others, but they are all doing the same thing and almost all children can be taught to add and subtract to some degree.

The same is not true of calculus, If all children were put on a mathematics track that took them through calculus, and then were given a test of calculus problems, the resulting scores would not look like a bell curve.
For a large proportion of children, the scores would not be merely low, They would be zero. Grasping calculus requires a certain level of logicalmathematical ability, Children below that level will never learn calculus, no matter how hard they study, It is a difference in kind, "

While Gardner and Murray have some hard data to support this, I can only confirm that this matches my experience with real world results.
I have a fairly high level of logicalmathematical intelligence, and studied higher mathematics in college until I reached linear algebra, and suddenly discovered that past a certain point, I just wasn't capable of doing much more than memorizing a few problem types and their solutions.
I also have a very low level of bodilykinesthetic intelligence, and it didn't matter how much instruction I got in the techniques of striking a tennis ball or hitting a baseball pitch, I was never going to be as good as someone with native talents in that area.
My wife and children have an innate musical ability that I will never possess, and they can pick up instruments and play a tune on them without any prior experience not me.


Murray says,
"For understanding an individual child and what that child's educational needs might be, you want as much disaggregation of the child's abilities as possible.
For understanding the overall relationship of the components of academic ability to educational performance and later outcomes in life for large groups of people, you are better of using a combined measure.
"

These combined measures might be found by taking standardized tests such as the ACT, SAT, or ASVAB.


I've become a somewhat convinced of a Bell Curve theory of just about everything these days.
For example, in politics, you will see a distribution of people from one end of the spectrum, from radical left to radical right, where IMHO most people fall into either centerleft or centerright, perhaps mixing and matching their convictions between positions readily identifiable as from both sides, while a smaller group on either end might hold nine out of ten beliefs identifying them as conservative or liberal, while a very tiny group are so far out there that their beliefs may even lead to irrationality or violence.


So, it's my hypothesis that in each area of Gardner's intelligences, we'll find over large groups of people that the distribution of each ability follows a bell curve pattern, with some out at the far ends of the curve having either infinitesimal abilities in that area, or amazing natural abilities, and the rest scattered from mild, to average, to pretty good, in the middle of the curve.
There are, unfortunately, certain folks who just aren't going to "get" mathematics, engineering or science, and others who aren't going to comprehend classic literature or write coherent research papers.
Some will excel in sports or music, others in winning the popularity contest,

Murray says,
"For any ability, the population forms a continuum that goes from very low to very high.
The core abilities that dominate academic success vary together, Schools that ignore those realities are doing a disservice to all their students, "
.
I always wondered what all the complaints were about "teaching to the test", There are lots of good tests out there, especially in the professional certification arena, where they are a very good measure of actual skills and knowledge acquired.
The actual material of the tests change regularly, so even the "cheat" sites can only give you examples of what types of questions you are likely to find, and it's not really productive to attempt to memorize answers for them, you just have to know the principles and have the skills in order to pass.


The author explains,

"If teachers know that a state competency test will include on item of this particular type calculating percentages, they can drill the students and raise the proportion that answer it correctly.
But if the test uses a new context and puts a different twist on the problem, . . it is up to the students to generalize their knowledge, and that calls upon logicalmathematical ability, "

A couple of interesting points:

"Literacy requires not just the linguistic ability to decode individual words, but also the logicalmathematical ability to infer, deduce and interpolate.
"

"Limits on logicalmathematical ability translate into limits on how much math a large number of children can learn no matter what the school system does.
"

I also found it interesting that the greatest "leap" in education in the U, S. came betweenand. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only aboutof adults ever reached the fifth grade, andnever made it past the eighth.
By, the percentage of students still in school up to the eighth grade had risen toand by,.
The biggest progress came with the availability of universal Kschooling, Gains since that point in time have been incremental,

There's a belief that the quality of schools makes a huge difference in children's educational outcomes.
Sociologist James Coleman led a study that examined,students nationwide and discovered that the quality of schools "explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement.
" The mean scores of students on academic achievement tests are not affected by the credentials of their teachers, the curriculum, sparkling new facilities, or money spent per student.


"Once a school reaches mediocrity, a lot of the slack has been taken out of the room for improvement in academic achievement for the average student.
"

Granted, a good teacher can make a great deal of difference in the life of an individual child, but over the long haul, for the vast majority of students, it appears that hiring better teachers will make little difference.


Politicians may promise this and that in order to improve education in this country, and we can throw all the money in the world at the problems we believe exist, but feelgood solutions can't trump reality.
You would think that the Head Start program begun back in the Johnson administration to help disadvantaged children get an educational boost would have shown some results by now, but a study by the Consortium of Longitudinal Studies found that "the effect of early education on intelligence test scores was not permanent.
"

"Responding to children in need is about as instinctive as human responses get, and as emotionally charged.
But deciding how to use scarce resources to help disadvantaged children is not a matter of caring.
It is a matter of deciding what works and what doesn't,

Murray wanders off into a discussion of statistical illiteracy, which is rather interesting in its implications.


"Widespread statistical illiteracy among the gifted is cause for immediate concern because none of us, no matter how thorough our training, has the time to assess the data independently on every topic.
We all have to rely on the quality of the information we get from the media and, as of today, that quality is terrible.
"

Amen!

Whether you agree with Murray's solutions you'll have to read for yourselves to see what they are, you can't argue with his facts, gathered over the decades from study after study on education.
I always find his work enlightening, .