Racism was a primitive totalitarianism; it was naked, obvious, malignant and crude. It possessed none of the technical efficiency of our current polices. The discussion of race in America highlights and obscures a fatal flaw in our country’s character – the Syllogism of the Satisfied. DuBois coined the term some time ago as a way of explaining the institutional denial of causality and consequence that our way of life is based on. Our SUVs are clean and safe, our diapers miraculously vanish and have no impact on the ecology, the rain forest were not that important and aqua net has nothing to do with skin cancer. These are explanations that can only be formulated through the logic of denial and superiority rooted in American exceptionalism. Now the Chicago Sun Times has used Charles Murray’s article to loose the logic of the Syllogism on our children.

It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence.

Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst. link

When I read the version of Murray’s article in the Sunday Chicago Sun Times (March 18, 2007 page 3b – not available online) I was furious. The article was redacted to suggest, not so subtlety, that a goodly portion of the population was beyond hope. That, the eugenicist arguments of native intelligence were, in fact, true; sad and lamentable but, true. They implied that the reasons our schools are failing and our children are being mis-educated have nothing to do with the fact that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is an unfunded mandate (technically it isn’t – operationally it is). There is no mention of the stranglehold NCLB has on American education; no mention that NCLB effectively siphons off educational funds and redistributes them to the major publishing houses.

Murray’s actual article says that the structure of educational policy is artificially swelling the ranks of colleges by denying the simple fact that college is not for everyone. While I don’t agree with Murray’s research, I can’t blame him for this abominable misrepresentation of his work by the Chicago Sun Times. It is a gross misrepresentation of research and a dangerous one at that. It is yet another example of the sensationalist propaganda that passes for news and an eerie harbinger of the direction society is being steered. Full