There’s a vociferous section of British opinion that insists that we must abolish private schools. This is just the rich buying privilege for their offspring. The extra money available for teaching budgets means that these little fauntleroys can lord it over their poorer bretheren in later life just because they passed the exams and thus were able to take that elevator to the top.
The same people who scream this are those who also insist that genes don’t have much to do with success nor intelligence. That it’s difficult to conceive how intelligence first arose if it’s not genetic is not really explained. To think that genes don’t matter in a sexually reproductive species which selects mates by social standing is also a slight flaw. But, OK, the insistence is that we’re all a tablua rasa, written upon by society. It’s our environment, not genes, that make us what we become.
Which is going to make this next finding difficult for them to process, isn’t it?
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Sending children to private schools like Eton is a waste of time because academic success is written in the genes meaning youngsters would do just as well at the local comprehensive, a leading scientist has claimed. Robert Plomin, Professor of Behavioural Genetic at King’s College London, said he and his team had spent decades trying to unpick how much of achievement in education was down to nature or nurture. He concluded that 50 per cent of academic success is due to genes, but they are yet to discover what accounts for the other half. What they do now know, however, is it is not due to schooling or upbringing. Studies have shown that adopted twins with the same genetics do just as well academically even if they have had vastly different education or parents. Although selective schools like Eton achieve higher grades, it is the selection process itself which accounts for the difference, and that same cohort would achieve the same marks if sent to a state school, Prof Plomin argues. [/perfectpullquote]So, joy unconfined over in the non-thinking parts of the left. Because we can abolish those private schools, they don’t make any difference anyway. Except the reason we can do so is because it’s not upbringing that matters, but genes. So the same people are going to succeed anyway.
It’s tough to navigate through scientific findings when your basic beliefs about life are wrong, isn’t it?
Ahh, the subject which will not be addressed in modern liberalism.
The British left, and in many ways this includes the Conservative Party, should take note.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26.3 “(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
Has anyone told that school in Brum?
It’s not the educational scores, it’s the less tangible things. The networking, for example. The undeniable social cachet (or the opposite, in the minds of people who are shut out). However, freedom is the issue. If parents think it is worth sending their kids to private schools, and they pay the tax for public education anyway, then who is to stop them?
It has always amused me that the left are fundamentalist creationists.
They believe that (Wo)Man is a separate creation from the rest of the animals. That while evolution is, of course, true; this only applies to the lower animals. Or that evolution only applies to the physical world and that there is an essential, spiritual, difference between gross matter and our thoughts and behaviours.
Most of them would be quite at home with the Southern Baptists. Given how they are nearly all puritanical prodnoses perhaps they are, and this is a conspiracy to get us from both ends.
Worse. It is entirely obvious and non-controversial to say humans evolved intelligence. We are not the same as chimps and have differently evolved brains. Yet apparently that same evolution led to everybody having the same intelligence!
So a process that happened and happened in a way that relies on inequality to work – preferential selection – somehow produced absolute equality. Unlike everything else everywhere in every species.
Ah yes, not surprising really. Also, not only the very rich send their kids to private school – should be the parents’ choice. For example I remember a woman who was not rich (sadly her husband died young) but she thought education important (probably in the genes) and her kids did very well. Sure they would probably been a success anyway but I’m sure they became more rounded individuals as a result. Allowing private schools provides that dreaded thing (from the left’s point of view) competition in education. So if they want to teach something in that isn’t taught in… Read more »