228 The
Bell Curve: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
The
Bell Curve
We still have to face the propaganda barrier set up by
statistical psychology — I mean the
scam which demonstrates mathematically that most people don't have the
stuff to do it. This is the rocket driving
School at breakneck speed
across the barren land it traverses as a mobile hospital for the detritus of evolution.
Could it be that all the pedagogical scientists have gotten it wrong? Are ordinary people better than they
think?
I found a telling clue in Charles
Murray's best seller, The Bell Curve, at the spot when Murray pauses to politely denounce
black schoolteacher Marva Collins' fantastic claim that ghetto black children had real enthusiasm for difficult
intellectual work. Oddly enough
that was exactly my own experience as a white schoolteacher with black
thirteen- year-olds from Harlem. I
was curious why Dr. Murray or Dr. Herrnstein, or both, became so exercised, since Marva Collins
otherwise doesn't figure in the book. So certain were the authors that Collins couldn 't be telling the truth,
that they dismissed her data while
admitting they hadn 't examined the situation firsthand. That is
contempt of a very high order,
however decorously phrased.
The anomaly struck me even as I lay in
the idyllic setting of a beach on the northern coast of Oahu, watched over by sea turtles, where I had gone to do
research for this book in America's most far-flung corporate colony,
Hawaii. Bell-curve theory has been around
since Methuselah under different names, just as theories of multiple
intelligence have; why get out of
sorts because a woman of color argued from her practice a dissent? Finally the light went on: bell-curve mudsill
theory loses its credibility if Marva Collins is telling the truth. Trillions of dollars and the
whole social order are at stake. Marva Collins has to be lying.
Is Marva telling the
truth? Thirty years of public school teaching whisper to me that she is.
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