There he goes again.

Once again, Charles Murray is arguing that some people are not worth the time and trouble to educate because they are “just not smart enough,” in his words, to learn anything more than manual skills. And he can prove it! Scientifically!

Murray, for those of you who don’t follow this stuff, is the co-author of The Bell Curve, which famously argued, among other things, that poor people are poor primarily because of immutably low intelligence—an argument that has been refuted by some of the top scientists in the country (see, for example, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man; see also The Bell Curve Wars). Murray is back with a new book that was excerpted in The Wall Street Journal this month, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.

A small part of what Murray is talking about is common sense—for example, that different people have different capacities for learning different kinds of things. And he actually has some rather trenchant criticisms of higher education that deserve discussion.

But in typical Murray fashion he goes far beyond what research and common sense allow to say that we as a nation can and should identify children’s innate capacity in first grade and sort them into different kinds of educational experiences, training some to be the worker bees and some to be the thinking leaders and decision makers they are meant to be. He posits himself as a man who has the courage to say what other, politically correct people, fear to say:

Most poor children simply don’t have the intellectual capacity to benefit from a liberal arts education.

It would be kinder, he says, to teach those children to fix cars rather than to ask them read novels, which are really more appropriate for—I’m going to take a leap, here—Murray’s children and grandchildren.

Murray is not the first to make an intellectual determinism argument, and he won’t be the last. But neither science nor history is really on his side.

For one thing, people have genetic limitations, but in most cases no one really knows exactly what they are, what they limit, or how to measure those limitations—in part because the human brain has the capacity to compensate for those limitations in surprising ways. Which raises the question: What sorting mechanism would be sufficient for this purpose? How reliable is it? Couldn’t there possibly be children who should go to college despite scoring low on whatever first-grade measure we allow Murray to choose?

As Ben Wildavsky said, in a wonderful answer to Murray in the Wall Street Journal, “One can’t help thinking: Woe to those who get put in the wrong category.”

In addition, Murray is ignoring the fact that good instruction makes a huge difference in what kids can and do learn. Just to give one example: from 1998 to 2005, Delaware’s poor children gained 25 scale score points in reading on the fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress. Some people (see my last blog entry) would count that as improving by more than two grade-levels of reading achievement in just seven years. This isn’t because poor children in Delaware were less poor or less isolated in 2005 than their older brothers and sisters had been in 1998—if anything, the opposite is the case. Instead, maybe, educators in Delaware have figured out something about reading instruction. Similarly, Alabama as a whole gained 8 points on NAEP in fourth-grade reading in the two short years between 2005 and 2007, a remarkable improvement. If teachers and administrators in Delaware and Alabama had accepted that poor children were doomed to the same achievement levels as had been achieved as in the past, they might not have bothered.

As a nation, we make the most progress when we simply ignore the notion that some people aren’t worth educating. In the middle of the 19th century, the establishment of the land-grant colleges and universities opened higher education to a much broader swath of Americans than ever before—the sons and daughters (mostly sons at first) of farmers and workers, many of whom went on to develop and implement the agricultural and industrial innovations which both helped propel the United States into its powerhouse status and later helped feed the world.

Similarly, the G.I. Bill opened even elite higher education institutions to the returning soldiers of World War II. The G.I.s were regarded by many professors and university administrators as bumpkins unworthy of the exquisite educational experience available at such places as Harvard and the University of Chicago. Courageous? Maybe. But were they “smart enough” to analyze and think? Well, those returning vets, once they got a higher education, provided much of the managerial and professional spine for the nation’s economy for the second-half of the 20th century.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, appearing on the News Hour in 2000, agreed with fellow historian Stephen Ambrose’s assessment that the G.I. Bill “made modern America.” Goodwin said, “It shows what happens when you give people who don’t have a chance an extraordinary opportunity.”

When this nation puts its energies into the idea that an education is the birthright of Americans, rather than a scarce commodity that must be doled out on the basis of pre-determined capacity, it sees enormous benefits.

We know that too often poor children and children of color follow an educational trajectory that could be plotted at birth. For Murray to trot out data to demonstrate that is evidence only that we have not done a good job teaching all children; it is not evidence that we can’t.

The worry I have about Charles Murray’s new book is that it will divert attention from the work that needs to be done—figuring out how to teach all kids—to argue yet again over whether we can and should.

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Karin Chenoweth is the author of “It’s Being Done”: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools 

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) designed the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and other parts of that city; Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York; Belle Isle Park, in Michigan; portions of the campus of Stanford University near San Francisco, California; the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina; and many other instances of what might be called “mediated landscapes” throughout North America. Until recently, he was little remembered outside the textbooks, but he was famous in his own day, cheered as a pioneer of a particularly American kind of garden and landscape design.

Olmsted was a man of the city, and, though he loved the countryside, he labored first of all to make America’s cities—then grim, smoky, congested, and often dangerous places—more livable. (That remains a challenge for designers, planners, and environmentalists today.) Along the way, by bringing it within their reach, he instructed city dwellers in the pleasures and value of nature, incorporating a sense of the wild in all his designs. All this helped ease the way to the development of a national park system in the closing years of his life, and it is no accident that the greatest architect of that system, Theodore Roosevelt, was a New Yorker who admired what is perhaps Olmsted’s most famous creation, Central Park, and sought out his opinions on how to protect some of America’s most scenic places.

Like Roosevelt, Olmsted packed many careers, wide travel, and deep learning into a long life. He came from a good family, but he was restless, and his father worried that young Frederick, who showed indications of straying from respectable commerce into the arts, was destined to be a dabbler and wastrel. To prove him wrong, and to escape whatever remedy his father might try to apply—an apprenticeship or clerkship, perhaps—Olmsted signed on as a hand on a China-bound freighter, and he served his young years as a common sailor.

His shipboard service, which steered him into many storms and required backbreaking labor, convinced Frederick that the seafaring life was not for him. It did nothing to cure his wanderlust, however. He spent time in Europe, studying art and touring monuments and ruins. He managed, briefly and disastrously, a California gold mine. He crisscrossed the country many times over, writing reports and articles, and worked as an editor for the New York Daily Times and The Nation, where he polished the prose of Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Finally, during the Civil War, he became the administrator of a hospital unit, where he witnessed horrors and bureaucratic ineptitude.

His experiences in the war helped settle Olmsted somewhat. Having seen so much destruction, he was now determined to serve the cause of beauty. He developed a vision of America’s landscape, with its broad vistas and open skies, as a means of shaping the national character. He labored to make America’s urban spaces speak to that promise, bringing trees and scenery into the congested grid of urban streets. He inserted wilderness and pastoral settings into the heart of North American cities such as Montreal, Boston, and Chicago, preferring a small human scale and the randomness of real life to European public spaces, with their imposing architecture and nothing-out-of-place formal gardens.

His program of parks, broad avenues, and greenways would, Olmsted argued, serve a public good by connecting city dwellers to the natural world—and, more practically, by relieving the city’s grim monotony of concrete and metal. And he was right: New York without a Central Park would be a different, and far poorer, place.

It is worth looking at Central Park in detail, for it well illustrates Olmsted’s ideas on what a great public space should be. Working with and often arguing with a formally trained partner for the duration of the project, Olmsted insisted that lawns, trees, and water be the park’s three great elements, punctuated by small plantings of flowers rather than the great, elaborate flowerbeds favored in classic European landscape design. Olmsted used trees as a painter uses colors, mixing different species in different combinations against big, grassy foregrounds. That pleasure in mystery is reflected in Central Park’s playful, mazelike paths, glades, tunnels, and bridges, which enable dwellers in what is certainly America’s most crowded city to find little spots to get away from other people. His other urban parks fill much the same need, offering both private spaces for harried urbanites and large open areas where they could meet en masse to play, see sports events, listen to concerts, and enjoy the sun.

Olmsted also took away from his hospital experiences the notion that planning was the key to success. Whereas most Americans of his time lived from year to year, bound to the cycles of agriculture and business, he considered what his projects might look like a hundred years and more in the future. He carefully plotted the placement of statues, fountains, ponds, benches, and flowerbeds alike, and he drew and erased and measured and drew again before putting anything on the ground—a very good practice for any gardener or home-improvement buff to take up.

Olmsted insisted on being allowed to act independently to achieve his vision. His clients usually complied, though they didn’t always pay him on time. It is hard to imagine any designer being given as much autonomy today, for now endless commissions, interest groups, and municipal offices turn every project into a design by committee—which may be one reason why modern gardens, parks, and public spaces seem formulaic and uninteresting in comparison to his creations.

Click here to watch a video of Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.