Extrait
Chapter 1Cognitive Class and Education, 1900-1990
In the course of the twentieth century, America opened the doors of its colleges wider than any previous generation of Americans, or other society in history, could have imagined possible. This democratization of higher education has raised new, barriers between people that may prove to be more divisive and intractable than the old ones.
The growth in the proportion of people getting college degrees is the most obvious result, with a fifteen-fold increase from 1900 to 1990. Even more important, the students going to college were being selected ever more efficiently for their high IQ. The crucial decade was the 1950s, when the percentage of top students who went to college rose by more than it had in the preceding three decades. By the beginning of the 1990s, about 80 percent of all students in the top quartile of ability continued to college after high school. Among the high school graduates in the top few percentiles of cognitive ability the chances of going to college already exceeded 90 percent.
Perhaps the most important of all the changes was the transformation of America's elite colleges. As more bright youngsters went off to college, the colleges themselves began to sort themselves out. Starting in the 1950s, a handful of restitutions became magnets for the very brightest of each year's new class. In these schools, the cognitive level of the students rose far above the rest of the college population.
Taken together, these trends have stratified America according to cognitive ability.
A perusal of Harvard's Freshman Register for 1952 shows a class looking very much as Harvard freshman classes had always looked. Under the photographs of the well-scrubbed, mostly East Coast, overwhelmingly white and Christian young men were home addresses from places like Philadelphia's Main Line, the Upper East Side of New York, and Boston's Beacon Hill. A large proportion of the class came from a handful of America's most exclusive boarding schools; Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover alone contributed almost 10 percent of the freshmen that year.
And yet for all its apparent exclusivity, Harvard was not so hard to get into in the fall of 1952. An applicant's chances of being admitted were about two out of three, and close to 90 percent if his father had gone to Harvard. With this modest level of competition, it is not surprising to learn that the Harvard student body was not uniformly brilliant. In fact, the mean SAT-Verbal score of the incoming freshmen class was only 583, well above the national mean but nothing to brag about. Harvard men came from a range of ability that could be duplicated in the top half of many state universities.
Let us advance the scene to 1960. Wilbur J. Bender, Harvard's dean of admissions, was about to leave his post and trying to sum up for the board of overseers what had happened in the eight years of his tenure. "The figures," he wrote, "report the greatest change in Harvard admissions, and thus in the Harvard student body, in a short time -- two college generations -- in our recorded history." Unquestionably, suddenly, but for no obvious reason, Harvard had become a different kind of place. The proportion of the incoming students from New England had dropped by a third. Public school graduates now outnumbered private school graduates. Instead of rejecting a third of its applicants, Harvard was rejecting more than two-thirds -- and the quality of those applicants had increased as well, so that many students who would have been admitted in 1952 were not even bothering to apply in 1960.
The SAT scores at Harvard had skyrocketed. In the fall of 1960, the average verbal score was 678 and the average math score was 695, an increase of almost a hundred points for each test. The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960. In eight years, Harvard had been transformed from a school primarily for the northeastern socioeconomic elite into a school populated by the brightest of the bright, drawn from all over the country.
The story of higher education in the United States during the twentieth century is generally taken to be one of the great American success stories, and with good reason. The record was not without blemishes, but the United States led the rest of the world in opening college to a mass population of young people of ability, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, and financial resources.
But this success story also has a paradoxically shadowy side, for education is a powerful divider and classifier. Education affects income, and income divides. Education affects occupation, and occupations divide. Education affects tastes and interests, grammar and accent, all of which divide. When access to higher education is restricted by class, race, or religion, these divisions cut across cognitive levels. But school is in itself, more immediately and directly than any other institution, the place where people of high cognitive ability excel and people of low cognitive ability fail. As America opened access to higher education, it opened up as well a revolution in the way that the American population sorted itself and divided itself. Three successively more efficient sorting processes were at work: the college population grew, it was recruited by cognitive ability more efficiently, and then it was further sorted among the colleges.
THE COLLEGE POPULATION GROWS
A social and economic gap separated high school graduates from college graduates in 1900 as in 1990; that much is not new. But the social md economic gap was not accompanied by much of a cognitive gap, became the vast majority of the brightest people in the United States had not gone to college. We may make that statement despite the lack of IQ scores from 1900 for the same reason that we can make such statements about Elizabethan England: It is true by mathematical necessity. In 1900, only about 2 percent of 23-year-olds got college degrees. Even if all of the 2 percent who went to college had IQs of 115 and above (and they did not), seven out of eight of the brightest 23-year-olds in the America of 1900 would have been without college degrees. This situation barely changed for the first two decades of the new century. Then, at the close of World War I, the role of college for American youths began an expansion that would last until 1974, interrupted only by the Great Depression and World War II.
The three lines in the figure show trends established in 1920-1929, 1935-1940, and 1954-1973, then extrapolated. They are there to highlight the three features of the figure worth noting. First, the long perspective serves as a counterweight to the common belief that the college population exploded suddenly after World War II. It certainly exploded in the sense that the number of college students went from a wartime trough to record highs, but this is because two generations of college students were crowded onto campuses at one time. In terms of trendlines, World War II and its aftermath was a blip, albeit a large blip. When this anomalous turmoil ended in the mid-1950s, the proportion of people getting college degrees was no higher than would have been predicted from the trends established in the 1920s or the last half of the 1930s (which are actually a single trend interrupted by the worst years of the depression).
The second notable feature of the figure is the large upward tilt in the trendline from the mid-1950s until 1974. That it began when it did -- the Eisenhower years -- comes as a surprise. The GI bill's impact had faded and the postwar baby boom had not yet reached college age. Presumably postwar prosperity had something to do with it, but the explanation cannot be simple. The slope remained steep in periods as different as Eisenhower's late 1950s, LBJ's mid-1960s, and Nixon's early 1970s.
After 1974 came a peculiar plunge in college degrees that lasted until 1981 -- peculiar because it occurred when the generosity of scholarships and loans, from colleges, foundations, and government alike, was at its peak. This period of declining graduates was then followed by a steep increase from 1981 to 1990 -- also peculiar, in that college was becoming harder to afford for middle-class Americans during those years. As of 1990, the proportion of students getting college degrees had more than made up for the losses during the 1970s and had established a new record, with B.A.s and B.S.s being awarded in such profusion that they amounted to 30 percent of the 23-year-old population.
MAKING GOOD ON THE IDEAL OF OPPORTUNITY
At first glance, we are telling a story of increasing democracy and intermingling, not of stratification. Once upon a time, the college degree was the preserve of a tiny minority; now almost a third of each new cohort of youths earns it. Surely, it would seem, this must mean that a broader range of people is going to college -- including people with a broader, not narrower, range of cognitive ability. Not so. At the same time that many more young people were going to college, they were also being selected ever more efficiently by cognitive ability.
A compilation of the studies conducted over the course of the century suggests that the crucial decade was the 1950s. The next figure shows the data for the students in the top quartile (the top 25 percent) in ability and is based on the proportion of students entering college (though not necessarily finishing) in the year following graduation from high school.
Again, the lines highlight trends set in particular periods, here 1925-1950 and 1950-1960. From one period to the next, the proportion of bright students getting to college leaped to new heights. There are two qualifications regarding this figure. First, it is based on high school graduates -- the only data available over this time period -- and therefore drastically understates the magnitude of the real change from the 1920s to the 1960s and thereafter, because so many of t...
Revue de presse
Michael Novak National Review
Our intellectual landscape has been disrupted by the equivalent of an
earthquake.
David Brooks The Wall Street Journal Has already kicked up more reaction than any social?science book this decade.
Peter Brimelow Forbes Long-awaited...massive, meticulous, minutely detailed, clear. Like Darwin's Origin of Species -- the intellectual event with which it is being seriously compared -- The Bell Curve offers a new synthesis of research...and a hypothesis of far-reaching explanatory power.
Milton Friedman This brilliant, original, objective, and lucidly written book will force you to rethink your biases and prejudices about the role that individual difference in intelligence plays in our economy, our policy, and our society.
Chester E. Finn, Jr. Commentary The Bell Curve's implications will be as profound for the beginning of the new century as Michael Harrington's discovery of "the other America" was for the final part of the old. Richard Herrnstein's bequest to us is a work of great value. Charles Murray's contribution goes on.
Prof. Thomas J. Bouchard Contemporary Psychology [The authors] have been cast as racists and elitists and The Bell Curve has been dismissed as pseudoscience....The book's message cannot be dismissed so easily. Herrnstein and Murray have written one of the most provocative social science books published in many years....This is a superbly written and exceedingly well documented book.
Christopher Caldwell American Spectator The Bell Curve is a comprehensive treatment of its subject,never mean-spirited or gloating. It gives a fair hearing to those who dissent scientifically from its propositions -- in fact, it bends over backward to be fair....Among the dozens of hostile articles that have thus far appeared, none has successfully refuted any of its science.
Malcolme W. Browne The New York Times Book Review Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein write that "for the last 30 years, the concept of intelligence has been a pariah in the world of ideas," and that the time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject. It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise.
Prof. Eugene D. Genovese National Review Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray might not feel at home with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Lani Guinier, but they should....They have all [made] brave attempts to force a national debate on urgent matters that will not go away. And they have met the same fate. Once again, academia and the mass media are straining every muscle to suppress debate.
Prof. Earl Hunt American Scientist The first reactions to The Bell Curve were expressions of public outrage. In the second round of reaction, some commentators suggested that Herrnstein and Murray were merely bringing up facts that were well known in the scientific community, but perhaps best not discussed in public. A Papua New Guinea language has a term for this, Mokita. It means "truth that we all know, but agree not to talk about." ...There are fascinating questions here for those interested in the interactions between sociology, economics, anthropology and cognitive science. We do not have the answers yet. We may need them soon, for policy makers who rely on Mokita are flying blind.
David Brooks The Wall Street Journal Has already kicked up more reaction than any social?science book this decade.
Peter Brimelow Forbes Long-awaited...massive, meticulous, minutely detailed, clear. Like Darwin's Origin of Species -- the intellectual event with which it is being seriously compared -- The Bell Curve offers a new synthesis of research...and a hypothesis of far-reaching explanatory power.
Milton Friedman This brilliant, original, objective, and lucidly written book will force you to rethink your biases and prejudices about the role that individual difference in intelligence plays in our economy, our policy, and our society.
Chester E. Finn, Jr. Commentary The Bell Curve's implications will be as profound for the beginning of the new century as Michael Harrington's discovery of "the other America" was for the final part of the old. Richard Herrnstein's bequest to us is a work of great value. Charles Murray's contribution goes on.
Prof. Thomas J. Bouchard Contemporary Psychology [The authors] have been cast as racists and elitists and The Bell Curve has been dismissed as pseudoscience....The book's message cannot be dismissed so easily. Herrnstein and Murray have written one of the most provocative social science books published in many years....This is a superbly written and exceedingly well documented book.
Christopher Caldwell American Spectator The Bell Curve is a comprehensive treatment of its subject,never mean-spirited or gloating. It gives a fair hearing to those who dissent scientifically from its propositions -- in fact, it bends over backward to be fair....Among the dozens of hostile articles that have thus far appeared, none has successfully refuted any of its science.
Malcolme W. Browne The New York Times Book Review Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein write that "for the last 30 years, the concept of intelligence has been a pariah in the world of ideas," and that the time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject. It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise.
Prof. Eugene D. Genovese National Review Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray might not feel at home with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Lani Guinier, but they should....They have all [made] brave attempts to force a national debate on urgent matters that will not go away. And they have met the same fate. Once again, academia and the mass media are straining every muscle to suppress debate.
Prof. Earl Hunt American Scientist The first reactions to The Bell Curve were expressions of public outrage. In the second round of reaction, some commentators suggested that Herrnstein and Murray were merely bringing up facts that were well known in the scientific community, but perhaps best not discussed in public. A Papua New Guinea language has a term for this, Mokita. It means "truth that we all know, but agree not to talk about." ...There are fascinating questions here for those interested in the interactions between sociology, economics, anthropology and cognitive science. We do not have the answers yet. We may need them soon, for policy makers who rely on Mokita are flying blind.
Livre censuré en France : The Bell curve
Ce livre a généré une énorme polémique dans le monde anglo-saxon en 1994 à sa sortie, mais très peu en a filtré en France. Évidemment le sujet n’y est pas pour rien, mais on se demande tout de même si cela peut justifier une telle omerta, de la part des médias, des politiques, et des éditeurs puisque ce livre n’a pas encore été traduit en français. Cela permet de mieux comprendre la puissance du phénomène de la censure, puisqu’un esprit qui n’a pas connaissance d’une chose ne peut même pas imaginer qu’elle existe et qu’elle puisse être débattue ailleurs dans le monde. En bons ethnocentriques que nous sommes en France, nous nous moquons parfois du manque de connaissances de telle ou telle peuplade du fin fond de l’Amazonie ou d’Afrique, sans nous rendre compte que nous pouvons être dans le même cas sur d’autres sujets vis-à-vis d’autres populations plus avancées que nous.
Il vaut toujours mieux connaître l’existence d’un livre, d’une idée ou d’une personne, que de ne pas la connaître, surtout si le choix ne nous est pas laissé. L’ignorance est la pire des prisons, et même les livres les plus atroces, Mein Kampf, les Protocoles des Sages de Sion, méritent d’être connus pour mieux comprendre, connaître voire critiquer les idées qui ont une telle influence de par le monde ou dans d’autres pays. A moins de considérer évidemment que les être humains adultes ne sont pas capables d’exercer leur esprit critique dès lors qu’on en vient à parler de certains sujets, comme l’Église le prétendait au Moyen-Age par exemple. Autant vous dire tout de suite que tel n’est pas notre cas, bien au contraire.
The Bell Curve
Ce livre, The Bell Curve, est “paru en 1994, écrit par le psychologue Richard J. Herrnstein et le politologue Charles Murray, tous deux américains. Leur thèse est que le QI serait un élément déterminant de caractéristiques comme les revenus, la criminalité, etc. Ils définissent une « élite cognitive » et abordent en particulier la question des différences d’intelligence selon l’appartenance ethnique, soit la thématique liée à la comparaison entre race et intelligence.”, pour reprendre la fiche wikipedia française. Donc ce livre n’est pas censuré sur le wikipedia français, mais la fiche anglaise est bien plus fournie, nous y renvoyons donc les anglophones que cela intéresse.
En France, l’énorme polémique créée par ce livre a très peu filtré, seul le JT de 20h de France 2 du 4 novembre 1994 en a fait état : “The Bell Curve veut démontrer, en 845 pages arides, que c’est l’intelligence, plus que la fortune, l’éducation ou la chance, qui détermine la réussite sociale. [...] Et même le président Clinton a dû donner son avis : “Je ne suis pas d’accord, ce livre va à l’encontre de toute notre histoire, de nos traditions.”" Et la journaliste de conclure : “The Bell Curve est déjà le livre le plus vendu mais sans doute le moins lu de l’année aux Etats-Unis.” Tout est dit.
Le magazine de vulgarisation scientifique La Recherche a abordé la polémique : “Le best-seller américain The Bell Curve a relancé la thèse selon laquelle l’intelligence est un caractère principalement héréditaire. Pour ses auteurs et les universitaires qui les soutiennent, seuls des tabous éthiques et politiques dépassés empêchent cette évidence d’être reconnue comme telle. La réalité est bien différente : l’hérédité de l’intelligence n’est pas démontrée. Les méthodes utilisées par les tenants de la thèse sont biaisées. Elles reposent en particulier sur de graves confusions dans l’emploi d’une notion complexe, l’héritabilité.”
Quant à l’Observatoire des inégalités, il regrette que le livre scientifique venant contredire The Bell Curve, Inequality by design, ait bénéficié d’une couverture médiatique bien moins importante aux Etats-Unis : “Alors que « The Bell Curve », publié en 1994 par Richard Herrenstein et Charles Murray, a connu une petite postérité en France (parfois grâce à des auteurs chez qui on ne l’attendait pas), la réponse collective des sociologues de l’université de Berkeley n’a eu presque aucun écho. C’est regrettable. Leur travail consiste en une réfutation des thèses d’un certain renouveau ultra-conservateur américain selon lesquelles l’intelligence serait héréditaire (et qu’il est par conséquent inutile de combattre les inégalités), et les différences raciales expliqueraient la réussite des individus.”
A contrario, on peut noter la tribune “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” d’un groupe de chercheurs initialement publiée dans le Wall Street Journal le 13 décembre 1994. Voici ce qu’en dit l’article que wikipedia lui a consacrée :
“Mainstream Science on Intelligence, que l’on pourrait traduire par “De l’état actuel de la science sur l’intelligence”, défend les thèses présentées dans le livre The Bell Curve, notamment sur l’importance de l’intelligence, son aspect génétique, et les différences observées entre les groupes ethniques, soit la thématique liée à la comparaison entre race et intelligence.
La tribune a été écrite par le docteur en psychologie Linda Gottfredson. Selon son auteure, il s’agit d’une réponse au traitement imprécis et trompeur qui était fait par les médias de l’état actuel de la recherche dans le domaine de l’intelligence. Elle a été signée et approuvée par 51 autres professeurs d’université spécialisés dans le domaine de la recherche en intelligence, dont à peu près un tiers des membres du conseil d’édition du journal Intelligence, dans lequel, par ailleurs, elle fut publiée à nouveau en 1997.”
Ce débat scientifique est censuré en France par les médias et la communauté scientifique, mais il a pourtant lieu dans le monde anglo-saxon et au Québec, jusqu’à ce jour.
Voici par exemple l’échange de quelques pages entre deux scientifiques dans le Québec sceptique :
- questionnements de Christian Tempe, physicien et membre du conseil d’administration des Sceptiques du Québec
- réponse de Serge Larrivée, Université de Montréal
Que retenir de tout cela ?
Hitler n’a pas seulement créé la Shoah, il a également durablement ancré en Europe l’idée (en opposition à la sienne) que les races n’existent pas, et par conséquent qu’il ne sert à rien d’en débattre, et qu’il serait même criminel de constater des faits allant en ce sens, car ce serait générer immédiatement sa résurrection. Pourtant faudrait-il interdire les recherches scientifiques ayant démontré l’évolution, alors que cela rabaisse l’homme à n’être qu’un pauvre descendant du singe ? Faudrait-il interdire les recherches scientifiques sur tout sujet dont l’une des interprétations possibles soit le racisme ? Autant interdire toute recherche sur les maladies spécifiques à certaines ethnies (comme la drépanocytose par exemple), ou sur la taille de certains groupes humains (les pygmées qui sont beaucoup plus petits que la moyenne), etc. Bref, notre morale post-Shoah nous a fermé de nombreuses portes dans la science, la sociologie et la psychologie qui nous empêchent de mieux comprendre le monde dans lequel nous vivons, et donc de trouver les meilleures solutions possibles pour en faire un meilleur monde. L’ironie vient du fait que ces études scientifiques démontreraient que les juifs ashkénazes ont un QI en moyenne supérieur à tous les autres… L’être humain doit encore mûrir pour pouvoir s’attacher aux faits plutôt qu’à sa morale, y compris aux faits qu’il ne comprend pas ou qui vont à l’encontre de ses préjugés. Pour citer le biologiste, paléontologue et philosophe britannique Thomas Henry Huxsley : “Mon travail consiste à apprendre à mes aspirations à se conformer aux faits, non pas à essayer d’harmoniser les faits avec mes aspirations.”
Voir aussi : Un nouveau paradigme de la race : http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Un-nouveau-paradigme-de-la-race.html
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