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.

*          *           *

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

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.

1) Coca-cola’s valorization of China – It is a big market that likes red things, and we don’t want them turning to Pepsi.

2) Budweiser – Every time the Dalmatian gives the Clydesdale a fist bump my two-year-old screams with delight and dances around the room.

3) Erectile dysfunction products – Evidently, nothing makes middle-aged men want to feel young and vital again more than re-kindling the lost dreams of athletic glory. Viva Viagra!

4) Presidential Candidates. John McCain and Barack Obama are going at it like it’s October here. I think that the fact that McCain runs ads that intone “We are worse off than we were four years ago” is still amazing to me, but with a “wrong track” number near 80%, it would be foolish to open with, “Let the good times keep rolling.”

However, what I am really interested in is the connection between (3) and (4) – I want someone to start asking the presidential candidates about IMPOTENCE. I don’t care about whether or not they need Viagra, or Cyalis, or Extenze, or even how many bedrooms they may have in their house(s). I want to know how they plan to deal with America’s impotence.

For the last eight years, we have been entranced by a narrative of infinite virility. We can, we are told, do anything we set our mind to. If an enemy defies us, we can attack them. If they fight back, we have a surge capable of controlling every force within their power. Not to overplay the sexual imagery, but the promise that our targets will submit to our advances if we only have the courage to be bold and forward has been repeated so often that it has become heresy to even question it.

But the last three weeks should confirm that our pretensions to infinite vigor and overwhelming force have been far less real than we hoped. Both Russia and China have confirmed that there is little we can do to contain their power. In Georgia, Russia continues to flout all our warnings that they must leave the sovereign boundaries of a country that we were recently intent on bringing into NATO. We should be relieved that we had not done so yet because if Georgia were in NATO, Russia would have attacked anyway, and we would have looked that much more helpless when we had no viable way to come to their defense.

On the other side of Asia, China has flouted every norm of liberalism that we thought they had promised to uphold in exchange for the Olympics, and we had no answer other than to gush over how efficiently the whole system works. They conclusively demonstrated that they could play all the games that interest American corporations and American consumers and still maintain a repressive political system. The contradiction that we thoroughly expected would undo them appears to be no contradiction at all, and we have no plan B for encouraging changes that they have no intention of making.

All of this is to say that the last President spent eight years vocally proclaiming that there was no limit to the potential transformation that American power and preeminence could bring to the world, and now the next President is likely to spend four (or eight) years trying to explain why we can’t change some things and how we must learn to live with or mitigate evils beyond our correction.

John McCain’s forceful denunciations of Russia’s invasion of Georgia did make Barack Obama’s slow, low-key, and calibrated call for restraint look somewhat weak and indecisive, and Obama quickly felt the need to ratchet up his rhetoric. However, neither has offered any clear and credible way to deter Russian designs on Georgia. McCain’s stated willingness to suspend Russia’s access to the G8 channels does not appear to scare the Russians nearly so much as it scares our European allies who are closer to the action and decisively dependent on Russian oil reserves. Does it make any sense at all to speak so strongly when carrying no stick?

Whoever the next President is, he will probably face an ongoing crisis in Georgia, a long-term question about how to deal with an immensely powerful China, and numerous other cases from Iran to Malaysia and North Korea in which our options are decisively limited. I, for one, would respect a President willing to say, “Yes, that is a very bad situation, but there is only so much we can do about it.” Neither Obama nor McCain seem very inclined to give that answer, but it is time that we admit that there are many national and international arenas (far from the bedroom) in which impotence is one of America’s most thorny problems.

This happens every four years, and every four years, it surprises me.  I mean, is there really someone left in the world—much less the U.S.—who doesn’t know who Barack Obama is?  Is unaware of what he stands for?  Really?

Of course everyone knows who he is, but many people, apparently, know this in the way that my friends who do not watch sports know who Kobe is. He’s that basketball guy. He’s supposed to be pretty good, right?  This is how many Americans apparently know Obama.  He’s that Democratic guy; he’s supposed to be pretty good, right?

So his wife’s task is not so much to introduce him, but to explain him.  To define him in the terms preferred by the Obama campaign, and do so in such a way that Obama and the Democrats can control the message about him, his candidacy, and his party.  Biographies are a time-honored method of doing this.  Pre-television presidents had them written and published by supporters, sometimes even famous authors. Michael Dukakis had his cousin Olympia do it for him; other candidates have relied on movies: Reagan gave us “Morning in America,” and Clinton became “the Man from Hope.”  

I can’t remember when a political wife did this; maybe that’s my memory, though. But expectations for Michelle Obama’s speech were high; the media told me (and surely they can’t be wrong) that she is a lightning rod for criticism; that she is considered aloof; that she may be too classy to appeal to the common person. She not only had to introduce her husband, she had to democratize him, and make him appear “presidential,” and “ready to lead.”

Following the tribute to Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his remarkable speech was no easy task.  But the Senator himself made it easier, as did many of the preliminary speakers: the focus for all these speakers was on values, on the issues of health care and equity, and, as the evening’s theme insisted, on national unity.

It was not an evening with any policy content, and that—rightly or wrongly—was clearly by design.  There was no consistent message to this evening’s speeches beyond the personal.

Michelle Obama hit every one of the personal themes in her speech, and she did it with nicely delivered stories, such as the anecdote about the drive home from the hospital with their first child.  She (and her family) told us who she was, where she was from, and what she believes in. She stood on her own and at her husband’s side. She was warm, she was touching, and she was very effective. 

Conventions are supposed to build momentum; the first night lays out the themes that will be hammered home during the rest of the convention and in the campaign that follows.  The tribute to Kennedy and the way in which his legacy was underlined in Obama’s candidacy was gracefully done. Despite the lack of any real message in the evening’s proceedings, there is much here that can be built on.     

Meet Michelle Obama. She’s married to that Democratic guy, and she’s pretty good.   

Tonight, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be one of the headlining speakers at the Democratic Convention in Denver.  Much of the commentary surrounding Senator Clinton’s speech is whether it will contribute to uniting the Democratic Party after the long and, at times, bitter primary battle between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. The discussion about Clinton’s speech is how she will address her loyal supporters, some of whom have been skeptical about supporting Senator Obama as he campaigns for the presidency.

During the primaries, there was much discussion of the unique history that was being made by Senators Clinton and Obama, as it became clear that one of them would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. (I even wrote a few Britannica blog entries on this topic.)  Since Senator Clinton formally conceded the nomination to Senator Obama in June, there has been repeated commentary about the “18 million cracks she made in the glass ceiling.”  The strength and viability of her candidacy for the nomination has changed the landscape of presidential politics in the United States.

Thus 80 years after the success of the Suffrage Movement in the United States, it is unremarkable that many of the headlining speakers at the Democratic National Convention this week are women. It is remarkably unremarkable that women are leaders within the party, that they hold a variety of elected offices, and that they are professionals and mothers simultaneously.   It is the content of the speeches that is being examined, not the mere fact that they are giving the speech.  While there continue to be issues of gender inequality, what was previously extraordinary (Representative Barbara Jordan’s keynote address at the DNC in 1976, Governor Ann Richard’s keynote address at the DNC in 1988) has become the norm.  Whenever the first woman is elected to the White House, it will be remarkable—but at some point, it will be remarkably unremarkable.