If you really want parental choice you need a school voucher system but….

….don’t forget the administrative complications By Robert Henderson The “free schools” currently being promoted by the Coalition Government (in reality the Tory part of it)  has two flaws:  it mixes private enterprise and public service and is in practice something likely to be of interest to the middle-class .  If greater choice and diversity for [...]

Tuition fees and Coalition lies

The coalition are floating their penal proposals for student funding on several lies. Lie 1. The tuition fee  debt  will not affect the ability to get a mortgage because the tuition fee debt will not  be collected if a person’s income falls below the minimum contributory figure which is set to become £21,000. This is a [...]

How British higher education became corrupted

Education is a first rate example of how quasi-commercialism can corrupt. It was a pincer movement from the bottom and the top, from schools to universities. Prior to the end of the 1980s our universities had been funded for decades by the University Grants Committee (UGC) which was made up academics. The UGC received an annual [...]

Societies and the implications of differing racial IQs

The general differences between societies plausibly express the societal differences in IQ: the more complex the society the greater the need for IQ related problem solving; the less complex, the greater the reliance on knowledge based behaviour. That is not to say that complex societies do not rely greatly on knowledge or that the simplest [...]

IQ and a dysgenic Western future

 Since Hitler, unapologetic eugenics has been beyond the Pale in mainstream political and academic discourse, although it chunters along unnamed in abortions for the genetically unfit and raises its head occasionally in books such as The Bell Curve which explores the effects of differential breeding, mainly in the USA, and concludes that there is a risk [...]

Why have whites dominated?

 Plausibly, whites have been the culturally dominant race – in the sense of creating the most sophisticated societies to date – because they marry a high average IQ with a superior verbal ability to that of Asians. This means they can both handle the IQ demands of an advanced sophisticated society and have sufficient sociability [...]

How the IQ level of a society rises

 How natural selection works on the mind is still uncertain, but if the attributes of mind are substantially genetically determined then they must be subject to natural selection. If this is the case then natural selection would favour differences in mentality which are suited to particular environments. The mechanics of a rising average IQ would [...]

The intelligence of erudition

 There is phenomenon which anyone who has gained a substantial knowledge of a subject may recognise: it is the point at which a qualitative change in understanding appears to occur, where connections are effortlessly made between disparate pieces of data and a  general understanding of the whole emerges. This is not a conscious process but [...]

Does an IQ test measure general intelligence?

Although IQ tests undoubtedly measure a wide range of mental ability and are valuable tools in predicting whether someone is likely to be fitted for a particular job or academic course and are predictors of social outcomes. But identifying useful mental qualities is one thing, assuming that the qualities constitute the totality of intelligence quite [...]

What is measured by IQ tests?

The general mental skills which IQ tests cover are the skills involved in  problem solving  which  rely  on  as  little  learned knowledge/behaviour as possible, the so-called culture free tests. These skills are those needed to deal with the unfamiliar, unfamiliar in both the sense of being pedantically novel and in the sense of being absolutely [...]