Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count By Richard E. Nisbett W.W. Norton, 2009
suggests that incentive programs that reward successful teachers correlate with higher student achievement. It should come as no surprise that the most successful educational initiatives are those that aim, in effect, to recreate a “middle-class” environment for underprivileged children. Focusing on early childhood, these programs engage the children using the best-available developmental aids and educational toys and provide intensive lessons and activities designed to cultivate the children’s cognitive, linguistic, and social faculties. The children are given good nutrition and quality medical care. Teachers meet routinely with parents, encourage them to become involved in their child’s education, and program staff actively work to promote stability and reduce conflict and stress in the home. The results of even the best of these programs have been mixed. While high gains in IQ are observed at the end of the programs, these fade with time. Nevertheless, Nisbett argues that the value in these programs can be found in
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the other, sustained achievement gains that were observed. For example, participants in these programs were less likely to repeat grades, more likely to do well on standardized tests, more likely to finish high school, less likely to have problems with delinquency, and less likely to become dependant on welfare. The only significant shortcoming of Nisbett’s book is its uncritical use of race. Because he undertakes to explain the IQ gap between “black” and “white” populations, race is necessarily one of the principal objects of his analysis. In light of decades of genetic research, however, the consensus is that “the idea of discrete races in the typological mindset of past centuries clearly does not apply to humans.”3 That racial distinctions have no genetic basis does not negate the existence of race. To the contrary, race is a potent sociocultural phenomenon that exercises great force in people’s lives. It is this theory of race— race as cultural construct—that provides the conceptual foundation for Nisbett’s focus on racially-defined populations. He uses race as a proxy meant to capture the complex dimensions of a sociocultural reality. While Nisbett’s use of race is therefore conceptually defensible, no such defense appears in his book. He simply presents his subject as “IQ in Black and White.” Next to his nuanced discussion of intelligence and genetics, his ubiquitous use of an outmoded racial typology seems almost clumsy. Perhaps worse, it implicitly “favors the default assumption that racial differences are genetic in origin.”4 This marks Nisbett’s book with a tacit racial essentialism and detracts from his central conclusion that biology alone is not the principal determinant of human intelligence. Overall, Nisbett’s book is a timely and illuminating contribution to the discussion of race, class, and intelligence. He presents a strong counterpoint to the hereditarian view of intelligence and supports his claims with ample research and solid reasoning. His discussion of how to improve education is limited by the paucity of reliable research in that area. While more research must be done,
Nisbett’s ultimate conclusion is a sound and important one: brains are not the prize of a genetic lottery, but products of environments over which we have control. To make the best of that control, the evidence suggests we put our resources toward creating richer “cognitive cultures” for all children: by educating parents, intervening to fix broken systems, and placing renewed emphasis on earlychildhood education. This, then, is why schools and cultures count.
Andrew D. Thibedeau, JD, joined CRG as a Fellow in June of 2009. Andrew graduated from the Suffolk University Law School in 2008 where he served as an editor of the Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy. Previously, he spent two years as a legal assistant to Thomas M. Sobol, working principally in pharmaceutical class action litigation.
1 The first such tests, designed at the turn of the last century, gauged intelligence by dividing a person’s “mental” age by their chronological age, hence intelligence quotient. 2 As Judge Leon R. Yankwich observed: “[T]here are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents.” Contest Over Children Ends, L.A. Times, Aug. 9, 1928, at A8. 3 John H. Relethford, Race and Global Patterns of Phenotypic Variation, 139 AM. J. OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 16, 20 (2009). 4 Clarence C. Gravlee, How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality, 139 AM. J. OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 47, 49 (2009).
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