The Bell Curve Justifies Inequality in Schools by Biological Differences and "Culture of Poverty

(from R. J. Herrnstein, and C. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, New York, Free Press, 1994)

• "… the disadvantage of low IQ outweighs that of low status. Youngsters from poor backgrounds with high IQs are likely to get through college these days, but those with low IQs, even if they come from well-to-do backgrounds, are not.... Meanwhile the results emphasize the need for more open exploration of a topic that has been almost as taboo in some circles as IQ: the possibility that "lower class" in its old-fashioned sense has an impact on how people behave." (p. 43,151)

• "We have already explained why the bias argument does not readily explain the ethnic differences and also why we say that genes may be part of the story.... Our own appraisal of the situation is that Jensen's main contentions regarding Spearman's hypothesis are intact and constitute a major challenge to purely environmental explanations of the B/W difference [that is, the black/white difference in cognitive performance on IQ tests]." (p. 312)

• "… the school is not a promising place to try to raise intelligence or to reduce intellectual differences, given the constraint on school budgets and the state of educational science....

• "Adoption at birth from bad environments to good environments raises cognitive functioning, especially in childhood…. we want to return to the state of affairs that prevailed until the 1960s, when children born to single women--where much of the problem of child neglect and abuse originates--were more likely to be give up at birth.... just a minority of students has the potential to become "an educated person" as we are using that term. It is not within everyone's ability to understand the world's intellectual heritage at the same level, any more than everyone who enters college can expect to be a theoretical physicist by trying hard enough. At every stage of learning, some people reach their limits." (pp. 414, 415-6, 444, emphasis added.)