Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Bell Curve Returns
With the enactment of a new GI Bill, the time has come to once again recall former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins’ prediction that the original 1944 legislation benefiting World War II soldiers would convert colleges and universities into “educational hobo jungles.” Perhaps it’s unfair — Hutchins, a veteran himself, was a noted legal scholar and philosopher whose influence on the university he led is still quite visible today. But that’s the price you pay for being so spectacularly (and quotably) wrong about one of the great policy issues of our time. Helping returning veterans attend college was only the beginning of the massive mid-20th century expansion of access to higher education in America. Most people see this as an unequivocal good and a job not yet done.
Yet an active strain of educational hobo-phobia remains, a persistent, largely sub rosa muttering that perhaps too many of the wrong kind of people are being allowed inside the ivy-covered walls. It’s not respectable conversation outside of conservative circles, due to its unvarnished elitism and 0-for-the-last-60-years-and-counting historical track record. But it lives on, and now has a new standard-bearer in the person of Charles Murray, author along with the late Richard Herrnstein of the hugely controversial 1994 treatise, The Bell Curve. In his new book, Real Education, Murray offers “four simple truths for bringing America’s schools back to reality.” The third is: “Too many people are going to college.”
Click here to read the rest at InsideHigherEd. -- |
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