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Entry: Neocons and the Left: Know Your Enemies Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/neocons_and_the_left_know_your_enemies#2529 Post contents: "Kevin," who are you to tell me how to express my opinions, or how much "cyber-ink" to expend? You really haven't answered any of my points, but have just emoted violently. Much luck to you with your children. I hope they receive an education that enables them to reach their full potential, whatever that may be. I agree with Mr. Ball that the current public educational system is deeply flawed. If I had school-age children today, I would not put them in Catholic schools, at the mercy of American Catholicism's sodomitical clergy. I would carefully screen and hire tutors and home-school them at a level appropriate to their capacity. I'm personally grateful that, in my case, IQ testing at age 6 enabled me to skip a couple of years of the stultifying public educational system - back in the 'fifties before it got as bad as it is now - to enter college at age 16, and to finish with it at age 19. My biases in this matter have something to do, you see, with personal experience. Turning to Mr. Ball's suggestion that we "bring back apprenticeships and the old way of evaluating intelligence by work performed instead of by artificial tests," this probably would work for some disciplines but not for others. Law could be taught by apprenticeship as it still is, for example, in England, where the qualification for being called to the bar is not a university degree, but rather is based upon having worked under a barrister in chambers and dined at the Inns of Court for a specified number of terms. It might well be the case that an eighteenth-century solicitor/writer to the signet or barrister/advocate, were he to be revived like Rip van Winkle, could practice law effectively today after a short period of private study to bring him up to date. On the other hand, can we really take seriously the suggestion that medicine, the physical sciences, or many types of engineering could successfully be taught to present-day standards? I should not wish to be treated by a person whose medical training was by apprenticeship in the eighteenth-century fashion. As for "the old way of evaluating intelligence by work performed instead of by artificial tests," this may be well and good when evaluating an adult. It is, however, difficult to evaluate the intelligence of a schoolboy of 6, 8, or 10 years of age by work performed, when he has barely learnt how to perform meaningful work. The subjective evaluations of schoolmasters are notoriously inaccurate. J. J. Berzelius, whose memory we honor whenever we write and balance a chemical equation using the symbols he invented, as a schoolboy was judged a dunce by his headmaster. Albert Einstein had a similar experience. Nobelist Norman Borlaug, who has just been honored again (at age 93) for his work in the genetic engineering of agricultural crop plants, was so poorly prepared when he graduated high school that he was placed in a remedial course - the so-called "general college" - before being allowed to proceed with further studies at the University of Minnesota. Borlaug has probably done more to feed the world's hungry than all the chattering pundits and bureaucrats in think-tanks, quangos, and the United Nations put together ever did. IQ tests determine native ability, not achievement, and are useful objective measures to determine whether youngsters have abilities like those of Berzelius, Einstein, or Borlaug, the existence of which has escaped the perception and subjective judgment of those who have been set to instruct them. Sent at: 2008 05 16