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Townhall
A
Challenge to Our Beliefs
by
Thomas Sowell
Dec
03, 2013
Depressing
news about black students scoring far below white students on various
mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of
the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different
explanations for why this is so. But both may have to do some
rethinking, in light of radically different news from England.
The
November 9th-15th issue of the distinguished British magazine "The
Economist" reports that, among children who are eligible for
free meals in England's schools, black children of immigrants from
Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the
time -- as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black
children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less
than 50 percent of the time.
At
the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low
enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English
children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time.
"The
Economist" points out that, in one borough of London, white
students scored lower than black students in any London borough.
These
data might seem to be some kind of fluke, but they confirm the
observations in a book titled "Life at the Bottom" by
British physician Theodore Dalrymple. He said that, among the
patients he treated in a hospital near a low-income housing project,
he could not recall any white 16-year-old who could multiply nine by
seven. Some could not even do three times seven.
What
jolts us is not only that this phenomenon is so different from what
we are used to seeing in the United States, but also that it fits
neither the genetic nor the environmental explanation of black-white
educational differences here.
These
white students in England come from the same race that produced
Shakespeare and the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton, among other
world class intellects over the centuries. But today many young
whites in England are barely literate, and have trouble with simple
arithmetic. Nor are these white students the victims of racial
discrimination, much less the descendants of slaves...
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
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