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Here's what diversity does to education:

Interesting. I hadn't heard of that proposal.

Overall, diversity is a great thing for kids and for schools. The problem in that article isn't the diversity, but a population that is misunderstanding where the acheivement gap comes from. My children both go to highly diverse schools, and there are many complex reasons that contribute to acheivement gaps, and solving it seems to be a one student at a time thing, but also a moving target due to pressures from outside the school. There has been a cost to my kid's academic education as a result of the economic diversity, but that is offset by what has been gained. My kids have a world perspective that few children do.

When human knowledge of the universe has been codified into language it can easily and expertly be disseminated through the current means of communication and it is that part of understanding which can be transferred much more efficiently and economically than today.
But laboratories and workshops confront the student with reality which is far more diverse and complex than most language can encompass. It is vital that young people learn to work with their eyes and their hands to discover for themselves the intricacies of time and space and energy and matter. Philosophers from the time of the ancient Greeks have disdained working with materials as that was considered slave labor and it was not until the Enlightenment that the value of insight out of handling materials became a major force in overthrowing the idiocies of philosophical fantasies out of pure linguistic manipulation which is the backbone of theological nonsense.

Dispensing with laboratories and workshops is a huge step back into the dark.

[original content deleted but quoted content with responses remain below]

Aah! The Super-race rides again.

Its a rule that if he argues for a persons side they automatically lose. Good thing he stayed away from your points, eh?

I'm debating deleting your post because it IS racist. The only question to me if it needs to be kept so that the counters are seen.

Races are not all exactly the same, trait for trait, person for person; that much is true, but you cannot accurately claim that innate IQ differences exist. That is just hogwash. So many factors go into success at school, and IQ isn't even the most important one. Nor is there any accurate way to test IQ differences between populations with completely different cultures and histories. I've seen brilliance from all sorts of children with all sorts of economic and racial backgrounds in my children's very diverse schools. I've seen the potential so many of those kids have. I've also seen how life beats that potential down, and how the spark starts to die, for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend or accurately be aware of. But I KNOW that spark was there, I KNOW that potential was there, and I know in my heart that the existance of that talent has nothing to do with race.

The so-called Hispanic is a descendant of two great civilizations:

The Spanish civilization, when when ruled by the Muslims was one of the brightest in the world and the Mayan Civilization which had the zero and positional arithmetic hundreds of years before Europe.

Since the Conquistadors ripped the Mayan, Aztec and Incan civilization to shreds it is no surprise that what was left looks less than sterling.

Your racist screeds are an example of historical and cultural ignorance. Keep up the good work. Eventually you will make the racists look as stupid as they really are.

ruveyn

You are letting your political opinions influence your moderating. To suggest those innate IQ differences exist between populations is quite reasonable considering the paths humans have travelled over the last 80,000 years to get where they are now and what we know about factors such as genetic drift and selection. It might be controversial, but it's a reasonable starting point for discussion. What you know in your heart, as you put it, is also completely irrelevant.

This doesn't say anything about race deciding culture.

He didn't provide evidence for there being a lower average IQ, but he also didn't say it was due to race.

He was being intelligence quotientist, stating that IQ helps determine culture/achievement.

DW_a_mom's response to it included this line "Nor is there any accurate way to test IQ differences between populations with completely different cultures and histories." which implies that different races always have different culture due to their race.

Ironically, that was the only technically racist thing I have seen so far XD.

Studies on IQ relating to genetics normally focuses on adopted children and does show that there is an IQ difference between races.

This doesn't mean that one race is more intelligent than the other because this is an average and there are exceptions but also IQ only measures one kind of intelligence.

The importance in these studies is to show how much the way we think is influenced by genetics and it would seem that we are very much influence by it, it is not to show which race is better.

I'm sure EQ averages and any other test will have considerable gaps between races too. Its about the genes really, but obviously thats related to race as there are attributes specific to certain races because they have been seperate. A clear example is Ashkenazi Jews and heart problems (tay sachs disease?) - this is also a strong case for races to interbreed.

If there were no gaps between races when the mind is influenced so strongly by genetics, we would be destroyed by homozygosity and it would be impossible to escape the effects you get from inbreeding.

Race-schism topic

I have always wondered about this term "race", clumping together those who look and act a certain way, share a certain lingo or way of speaking, who live in a certain neighbourhood, city, country. The tendency of people with shared attributes wanting to stay together can both benefit and destroy.

Historically, this worked for Jews, who valued learning, study, financial independence, even if this was not a total choice (due to ghettoization and prejudice.) Being separate meant valuing intellect, as the smarter ones married and reproduced and cousin marriage ensured a big pool of smart genes.

In the deep and dirty Southern US, it worked against African Americans, and Hispanics unless there were exceptions. Geniuses are few and far between, and they did not stay--they were able to move on to higher education, better jobs and neighbourhoods.They would come back to help, but the there was only so much a few individuals could do. And structural changes to education, standard of living, and a resulting better economic future for the mass of people takes time, and is still evolving.
In Canada, the First Nations peoples are also still emerging from second and third rate educations and poverty stricken communities. It is the rare person who can rise above this, and as with African Americans, most of the time had to leave the community to realize his/her potential (I am not referring to the destructive Native residential schools, for these were beyond the worst for FN children. It would have been better for these children to remain in their communities, as horrifying repercussions reverberate to this day.)

What I am trying to show here is that in these disadvantaged communities, you had to be brilliant in order to get ahead. So the whole thing is therefore skewed. You need a middle class of human beings, both in the economy and in the education system in order for average children to reach an even average potential and to make a better neighbourhood/economy. In disadvantaged neighbourhoods, this is not going to happen unless the education for average students (I was one of these students) improves. And this means better qualified teachers, some rote learning, instilling/fostering a love for learning that goes beyond the classroom, computers that can be used from home, independent study, and the understanding that learning is lifelong. And since everyone learns differently (even average kids) each child must be evaluated to ensure and maximize learning and ability.

Have you heard all this before? It can not be repeated often enough.The only race that matters is that we must not "race" the minds of children, as this is destructive.

I'll consider your point. At the time, everyone who had seen the post and responded seemed to feel it was racist. Perhaps the difference isn't so much in acknowledging that there might be IQ differences as to saying exactly what they are (as in, this race is superior in IQ to that race) ... to my knowledge, there is no documented evidence of what "race" scores higher than another, and you would have to ask, "whose test do you use," as all the tests include some component that is, in essence, unique to the culture of the person or group creating the test, no matter how hard they try to nuetralize that.

The racists always seem blind to the fact that populations blend at their edges. They would neatly divide people according to dominate cultural centers.

For example, the Berbers. Indigenous to Africa, they are certainly not 'black' but nor do they dominate their fellow Africans with some vague genetic legacy revealed by their lack of pigmentation.

There are also a number of people that live in the areas dividing eastern Europe and Siberia that are not exactly 'white' nor 'asian yellow'. Blond hair and blue eyes exist in their populations. More of these groups exist to the inconvenience of racists, such as in India. Who could forget the beautiful green eyes of that girl in Afghanistan?



The racists forget of course. Never mind that she and her family are just poor farmers; is she white or is she brown? Well, shes neither. You could drop her in a grade 3 class in Canada and nobody would think "shes not white". I know Germans that are darker than she is. She would blend in with Jews as well, or south America.

Racism, racists, the whole concept of race is stupid.

I have to agree with that in concept. It certainly has created rifts that seem unecessary.

I actually think its good that we're talking about this. It tends to become the elephant in the room that everyone reacts to but no one is willing to express.

I once heard some quotes from a corporate diversity specialist who insists everyone is racist. That, by itself, and as a member of an oftenly negatively profiled minority group, he doesn't mind. It's pretending to be color blind when you aren't that he minds. His point was that people first have to acknowledge their instinctive reactions to people who differ from themselves if they want to act with real fairness.

Yes thats right. Its something I struggle with from time to time, but once I recognise it, I take steps to change. I dont mind admitting it.

It is the nature of humans to classify things according to flawed types. And then to judge them as good or bad. But it is also in our nature to ignore our instincts. And there lies the right path. We must strive to become better than our instincts permit.

That would depend on how you define "racist". But anyway, the fact some populations blend, as you put it, at the edges doesn't invalidate the concept of what many would call race any more than red blending into orange invalidates the concept of colour. Furthermore, in many areas of the world oceans, mountain ranges and deserts have prevented such blending in the first place. Grouping people into say northern European, or sub-saharan African might be an over simplification for many purposes, but for others it's quite adequate to demonstrate certain points. For example analysis of mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome shows the majority of the people in these two groups have been separated ancestrally for maybe 80,000 years since they last lived together in Africa. You can do the same with many other populations: remember that the enforced multicultural nightmare some experience in North America is not typical of how people have lived in the past, and still in many parts of the world (even in this part of the UK in some rural areas) a persons family is likely to have lived on the same part of the planet for thousands of years.


Berbers are indigenous to north Africa, the population of which is distinct from sub-Saharan Africa (Africa is a big place). Genetic evidence suggests they colonised the area from the north, in other words from Eurasia along the shore of the Mediterranean, over 30,000 years ago.

I guess having taken the trouble to find that out makes me a racist... oh well.