Tips for the Admissions Test ... to Kindergarten
Kayla Rosenblum sat upright and poised as she breezed through the shapes and numbers, a leopard-patterned finger puppet resting next to her for moral support.
But then came something she had never seen before: a visual analogy showing a picture of a whole cake next to a slice of cake. What picture went with a loaf of bread in the same way?
Kayla, who will be 4 in December, held her tiny pointer finger still as she inspected the four choices. “Too hard,” she peeped.
Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.
Motivated by a recession putting private schools out of reach and concern about the state of regular public education, parents — some wealthy, some not — are signing up at companies like Bright Kids NYC. Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.These types of businesses have popped up around the country, but took off in New York City when it made the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam [i.e., and IQ test], and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test, the universal tests for gifted admissions beginning in 2008.
Kayla’s session at Bright Kids was an initial assessment; her mother, Jena Rosenblum, had not decided whether to put her through a full course of tutoring. She was considering it at the suggestion of Kayla’s preschool teacher. “Even though we live in the West Village and there are great public schools, obviously, any opportunity to step it up a notch in caliber, we would like to try,” Ms. Rosenblum said.
Melisa Kehlmann said her main concern was that her 4-year-old son, Adrian, would be shut out of the well-regarded but overcrowded schools in her Manhattan neighborhood.
“It’s quite pricey, but compared to private school, which averages about $20,000 for kindergarten, the price is right,” she said of the tutoring. “I just want the opportunity to have a choice.”
Private schools warn that they will look negatively on children they suspect of being prepped for the tests they use to select students, like the Educational Records Bureau exam, or E.R.B., even though parents and admissions officers say it quietly takes place. (Bright Kids, for example, also offers E.R.B. tutoring.) [Last I checked, E.R.B. gave the Wechsler IQ test to four-year-olds.]
“It’s unethical,” said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side. “It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.”
No similar message, however, has come from the public schools. In fact, the city distributes 16 Olsat practice questions to “level the playing field,” said Anna Commitante, the head of gifted and talented programs for the city’s Department of Education.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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54 comments:
Good then, we can all look forward to yet another crop of royally f*cked up movers and shakers coming of age in about 30 years, and hell bent on instructing the rest of the country -- no, make that the world -- in how to conduct both public and private affairs, all the while blithely ignoring and bypassing their own diktats to the lumpenproletariat. Thus our ancien regime sustains itself.
I dare say it may be different for little toddlekins, but don't I remember that practising IQ tests is a thoroughly good thing, because each examinee's improvement soon saturates and then you've got a level playing field?
Damn WASPs again, right Testy?
The two most salient features of the Left wing overclass are their classism and their tribalism. Their classism reflects itself in the pursuit of patents of nobility, most typically in the form of Ivy league or other “prestige” school degrees. I’ve worked with Leftist elites so titled, and when someone without such a credential “shows them up”, even without trying, they react with outrage. Just think of a Michelle Obama type or the inability of any of the Neocons to engage in let alone win a debate of ideas against anyone to their right.
Left wing tribalism can appear as more varied, from flying a “gay pride flag” to wearing “multi-cultural” clothing to fierce loyalty to foreign nations (e.g., Israel, Ireland, China, etc.). So far, Left wing tribalism has focused mostly on attacking America’s Wasp past and while that game hasn’t played itself out yet, it soon will. Once the various Left wing tribes realize they have defeated the old stock white Protestants for good, they will need a new focus of evil to attack (and to avoid turning on each other).
Ah, an opportunity for New York parents and children to learn about the Heisenberg Principle in premature testing. An accidental Advanced Placement course for three-year-olds.
It's the same with most politicians, who do everything possible to prevent reform of our public schools while sending their own kids to the finest private schools money can buy.
“[Prepping your kiddiewinkie for a Junior Jumble IQ test] is unethical,” said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side. “It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.”
Well, if it's any consolation to lumpen proletariat kindergartners, Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who invented the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum electrodynamics, would have been rejected as a tot by the Dalton school since his 125 IQ would not have impressed them. On the other hand, they would have cheerfully admitted bit part movie actor Crispin Glover, who hilariously tried to kick David Letterman in the head when he guested on Late Night -- a brilliant, yet career-killing move.
I prepped my kid for the ERB and it works. The early age IQ tests are totally fallible. Most kids brains aren't fully wired up until age seven or eight anyway so kids are still jockeying for position on the Bell Curve, especially at the high end c.f. Feynman and Glover.
Notice how the mothers reflexively defend the tutoring regime as just wanting a "choice" (in reality, it is a desperate effort to keep their children out of the ordinary public schools and away from contact with the diversity and budding gangstas who attend them). Obviously they are aware that there is some tension between what they say and what they do. As a parent, I understand. As a conservative, I find this risible.
"“It’s unethical,” said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side. “It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.”"
So how does she feel about HeadStart? Is that also unethical?
From the Dalton School's website, the usual diversity pablum:
"Diversity
The success of any community in its diversity mission is reflected in its vision and its outcomes. A work in progress, the Dalton school is wholly committed to the vision of a democratic community and is engaged in community-wide, ongoing dialogue on diversity issues. Our mission to educate students for true leadership so that they may “go forth unafraid” in a complex global community hinges on their capacity to think critically and make ethical decisions that stem from a core belief in the value of difference, a real sense of cultural fluency, and a sincere and empathic regard for interdependence and the ways in which diversity enriches the way that we see ourselves and each other."
But how diverse is the Dalton School, really?
It's funny when rich liberals declaim how egalitarian they are - they are egalitarianism's greatest enemies.
Waydaminit.
If people can prep their kids to do an IQ test then how can IQ be 'inherent'?
That story is disgusting on at least three levels.
This is just sad. Can't children just be children. Competitive education doesn't need to start until around 6th or 7th grade.
Paragraph-Of-The-Month-Club entry:
"'It’s unethical,' said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side. 'It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.'"
Remind us, Dr. Krents. Is testing unethical because it is predictive, or because it isn't predictive?
Paging Malcolm Gladwell! Paging Malcolm Gladwell!
this is the advanced feeder and filter system that produces the timeless wisdom brought forth by our enlightened elite class.
led by the champions of scholastic testing there is nothing we can't achieve. the sky is the limit.
the intellectual output of this era in american history will ring through the ages! and yes 21st century manhattan is the new athens.
from the scintillating intellectual dynamo bill clinton to sages friedman frum gladwell and the king of new york mike bloomberg. the city is a hive of geniuses not gathered together since renaissance italy!
Hypocrisy - thy name is New York media elite liberal...
Yes, the urban liberal elite is hypocritical, but I'm think this is less about IQ and more about social vanity and status.
No sane or intelligent person can possibly believe that his or her child can learn SO MUCH in kindergarten. No, they want to spend lots of dough or use connections to get their kids into top kindergartens and primary schools so as to show off to their peers that 'my child attends Harvard-for-toddlers'.
And, this is really nothing new if you think about it. Even in the gilded age of the 19th century, many rich folks were terribly into social status while at the same time professing social progress and justice. I think it's rooted in Christian consciouness. We want to be rich but we've all been affected by Christian morals which preach equality. And, Jews have some of this too, as their book emphasizes both the profit and the prophet. Also, Judaism is, at once, universal and tribal. There is one God, one truth for everyone, thus universal. But, it also professes the existence of a chosen elect or the special elite--the Jews. Though most Jews are secular, they've been influenced by this line of thought for 1000s of yrs. Just as Chinese are still affected by the idea of Middle Kingdom--though they consciously know China is not the center of the universe--, Jews may still be structurally influenced by their traditional mode of thought. Christians too. They say Europe is post-Christian, but in terms of its missionary save-the-world-through-charity zeal and openness to immigration in the name of tolerance and universal love, they are more Christianish than ever.
This strikes close to home. My daughter did relatively poorly on the OLSAT (the public school IQ test) but aced the ERB (the private school IQ test). So she's in private school. Kindergarten is bad enough, but for first graders onward tuition is over $30,000.
The funny thing is that, as any psychometrician could tell you, IQ tests are more reliable when given to teens and young adults than to toddlers, and are more informative about large populations than individuals. If all you know about two people is that one has an IQ score of 90 and one has an IQ score of 100, you can't say much about their future prospects. (For starters, person #1 might have had a bad day when he got tested, like my daughter the day she took the OLSAT). But if you have two groups of ten million each, one with an average IQ of 90 and one with an average IQ of 100, you can make some pretty accurate predictions about those groups' prospects. Yet we use IQ tests on 4-year olds to determine whether they can get into G&T programs or elite private schools, but we don't use them to inform, say, immigration policy. (As you have often written, the military does use them to good effect.)
One thing you may want to keep an eye on: previously, I understand, the G&T cutoff was something like 98%, and G&T programs were almost all white and Asian. The 90% cutoff is relatively new. If they don't have enough slots to accommodate 10% of the PS population, school administrators will have a lot of discretion to make the G&T programs look "more like New York" -- the PS population, as opposed to the population as a whole, is about 90% black and Hispanic.
It's a kind of affirmative action for white people. Not to get them promoted ahead of other ethnic groups, but ahead of their own. Pretty disgusting.
Many years ago (1966) and for about 3 years, I worked with a guy who'd retired from a job as head of the Statistical Section of the New York Dept. of Sanitation; he'd graduated from Cooper Union. Although he never mentioned anything about IQ testing, he emphasized just how competitive it was to get into the prestige kindergartens, even in that day (of his childhood) which would have been back around (maybe before) WW I.
Nonsense. Private schools do not use these tests for admissions. Why would they create a disparate impact paper trail?
Kindergarten admissions are based entirely on interviews. The elite schools have 3-5 applicants per space or more, but nearly all of those applicants are immediately washed out. There is a public perception that admissions to elite primary schools is competitive, but this is wrong, because the pool of qualified applicants is very small. My experience in these schools, which is extensive, leads me to believe that the average IQ of the students is 120 or even higher. This is borne out by their SAT scores. *There just aren't that many smart kids.* There is a subtle but important distinction between being competitive and being select. The illusion of competitiveness, which creates the kind of nonsense that is described in the article, comes from the large group of parents who can afford the fees but whose children are not that smart.
The really interesting thing about private school admissions is this: everyone involved is an expert amateur psychometrician. There is a wealth of practical information about recognizing intelligence in 4yos that these (mostly) women have.
re: "IQ and Early Childhood Education"
My late mother-in-law had a Masters Degree in Early Childhood Education and insisted that her daughter obtain a NYC teaching certificate in the same as a "fall back" position should she ever need it. My wife who eventually earned an Ivy League Ph.D. in a hard science did eventually need it. She and I tied the Knot just as I entered the Service. I was stationed for two years out West in some rather remote country where during the second year she obtained a job teaching Pre-First Grade* to Indian Children at an all Indian School funded by the Federal Government.
She grew up in NYC and never learned to drive. We dated for nearly two years before we married and I never learned that she did not drive a car. Once she joined me out West I discovered she couldn't drive. Well she needed to drive to get the teaching job as I could not drive her to the school every day and pick her up at the end of the day. Well, I failed** in teaching her how to drive a car but she met a researcher who was getting data on Indian Children who where in their 4th year (the year from 3 to 4). He was testing all of the Indian Children of that age group on the reservation. He taught her to drive and she and I got to know him rather well. He returned to finish his doctorate at the end of that summer.
While he was testing the Indian Children he voiced his unease. He was doing IQ testing. The scores of the children were no where near a mean of 100 or even 90 or even 80. At that time, late 1960's, I was totally unschooled about IQ. That experience and stories from my wife about her teaching Pre-First Grade made me want to learn about IQ. What I did learn was that HBD is real.
What the New Yorkers in your essay exhibit is that they have learned the same lesson.
Dan Kurt
* Pre-First Grade. The grade between kindergarten and first grade where children are placed who have essentially failed kindergarten. At the Indian School there was one class for each grade from kindergarden through 12th grade but TWO classes of Pre-First Grade.
** Advice to just married husbands: if your new bride does not drive a car, DO NOT RISK YOUR MARRIAGE by trying to teach her to drive.
Steve, will these classes work? From what I gather based on your writing and my general experience, it seems futile. Isn't that the whole point of all these studies? No matter how hard to try to teach certain ethnicities or races (like blacks), they just never improve their IQ to bring them comparable to whites?
I note that if they could avoid the IQ tests, they wouldn't get their kids tested for IQ. The IQ test is just part of the series of hoops that schools make students jump through. Preschools also interview the parents, interview the kid, study the kid interacting with other kids, etc.
The key thing about the public school testing is that it's the system's way of rationing, as fairly as possible, the limited number of good spots in schools. For a variety of reasons, all of which I'm sure you're familiar with, public schools in cities just generally aren't any good.
I don't know what's more shocking, reading that NYC liberals IQ test their kids for entrance to elite PRE-SCHOOLS or reading that NYC liberals actually pro-create? I thought they were all gay or DINKs.
"media elite" "new yorkers"
Yeah.
Funny, I think they are also that a little hypocritical about immigration & ethnic identity to that bastion of WASP power in the middle east.
My son just entered kindergarten, and at that age it seems that testing can't help but be affected somewhat by the tester. Most of the questioning is verbal, since the kids don't read reliably yet. Even when it's done with pictures, it's up to the tester to prompt the student - no 4-5 year old has the concentration to finish a test by themselves even if it was possible. And tests of reading numbers or simple "sight words" depend on the student having been drilled in their recognition earlier - a measure of achievement, but not necessarily aptitude.
So I would guess that test preparation makes more of a difference at this stage than later in life. As for the parents - well, if they really loved their kids they wouldn't try to raise them in Manhattan.
Richard Feynman, who invented the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum electrodynamics, would have been rejected as a tot by the Dalton school since his 125 IQ would not have impressed them.
Someone once mentioned this before, and I think it comes from Gleick's book, but although I'm not an IQist, I'm really pretty skeptical.
Unless Feynman was playing some sort of joke on the tester, I'd guess it's just a misprint. The real score might have been 215 or (more likely) 251, though probably not 512..
P.S. As an example of why I lean toward IQ=251 for Feynman, I read somewhere that while he was still in H.S., he developed a consistent framework of "fractional differentiation", the sort of fascinating concept which world-class mathematicians would produce long after they had gained tenure at Harvard.
Thinking a bit more about it, maybe his IQ score really was 512 after all...
What is the appeal of urban life that is so strong that people are willing to pay $30,000/year for private school rather than simply moving to a suburb with good public schools? Not only would they probably save money in the end, but their children would have a more normal childhood. A good public school is far more diverse - in the positive, undebased sense of the word - than a Manhattan private school.
I just don't get it. These people have one or more children and are probably over 30. It's not like they're clubbing every night. I also doubt if most of them are regularly attending the opera, theater, symphony or other urban cultural activities; people claim to love the city for these things but hardly ever actually go to them.
Is it food? Wealthy, close-in suburbs have plenty of good restaurants and are well supplied with branches of Whole Foods. What more do you need?
I understand why a 25-year-old wants to live in the city. I can't figure out why anyone over 30 with children would want to.
A very interesting comment thread. There are just a few things to address.
It's a kind of affirmative action for white people. Not to get them promoted ahead of other ethnic groups, but ahead of their own. Pretty disgusting.
Not so. These parents are trying to get their kids into a G&T program so their child can go to school with kids who are smart and interested in learning. It just so happens that this involves going to school with lots of white and Asian kids. But the parents (almost all good liberals) are not thinking in racial terms.
Of course, they also want to avoid committing themselves to $35K per child per year in tuition as long as they remain in Manhattan. This, by the way, is why admission to G&T programs in NYC is overwhelmingly done in kindergarten, even though it would make more sense to do it a few years later; kindergarten is when the elite private schools admit almost all their students.
The competition for G&T programs in NYC is not the NYC public schools; it's the private schools and public schools in the well-off burbs. Every article on education in New York City should probably have a paragraph explaining this fact. (Generalizing from this, if you ever come across any aspect of public policy in the USA that seemingly makes no sense at all, look for a racial angle.)
But how diverse is the Dalton School, really?
In terms of IQ, not very diverse at all. All elite schools in NY admit a handful of genuinely poor black and Hispanic children. Some of those poor kids are pretty bright; apart from them, everyone is bright.
But in terms of race/ethnicity, Dalton and the rest are reasonably diverse. There are lots of intelligent and well-off Chinese and Indians in the financial sector, and some blacks and Hispanics in finance and law. There is a lovely (blonde) Puerto Rican mom whose daughter goes to school with my daughter. That daughter is about as disadvantaged as Carlos Slim, but she still counts for diversity purposes.
Nonsense. Private schools do not use these tests for admissions. Why would they create a disparate impact paper trail?
I think the article is mostly about the tests the public G&T programs use. But the private schools use the ERB. They don't call it an IQ test, but that is what it is, as a few minutes googling will show.
I agree with you that the admissions officers (including the formidable "Babby" Krents, the woman quoted in the article) are gifted amateur psychometricians. But the schools still want an objective measurement of their applicants' intelligence. Since these schools are quite demanding academically, they can't admit too many students who aren't well above average intelligence. Also, all of these schools publish where their graduates go to college.
The admissions office has to look at other things, especially how well off the parents are (will they give money?)and whether they are agreeable people with leisure time who will pitch in for traffic patrol or helping reshelve library books. Despite their enormous tuitions, these schools rely on volunteer (mostly female) labor.
Going slightly O/T.
Just watched a Discovery Channel show about Bert Rutan/Spaceship One and the run-up to their X Prize success a few years back.
Rutan's team - all men, all white. Engineers, pilots, designers, ground crew etc. Not a sign of any of those vital cognative elitist Asians we seemingly can't manage without. Not quite all though - there was one black guy in evidence, part of the fire crew on the ground.
Apart from that, the moment isteveoids may have noted was when one of the test pilots got his astronaut wings from an FAA apparatchik. She was a black woman. It was almost a jarring contrast.
Steve Wood: Why would anyone with kids stay in Manhattan? I know a couple who stay there because: the husband makes in excess of $140,000 per year with virtually no commute, and they live in a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side which to which the husband succeeded when his mother passed away. Even now, 20 years later, the rent for the apartment is way less than half the "market" rent.
He could not make this kind of money in the suburbs with such a low housing cost. If you want to understand why people live where they live in NYC, you cannot ignore rent control. Although I'll admit, the Dalton School tuition nearly broke them.
If people can prep their kids to do an IQ test then how can IQ be 'inherent'
Test preparation or coaching doesn't necessarily level the playing field.
Without test prep or coaching, one person might score x + n and another person might score x - n on the standardized test.
With coaching, x -n might improve to x - n + k.
However, x +n may improve to x + n + k + an additional increment.
Good then, we can all look forward to yet another crop of royally f*cked up movers and shakers coming of age in about 30 years, and hell bent on instructing the rest of the country -- no, make that the world -- in how to conduct both public and private affairs...
Well, according to the new EU President Something von Rumpuy, 2009 marked the 'first year of global governance.' Global media, global governance, so yes...
I've been to New York (haven't we all). I didn't see too many white people. Even fewer white kids, I am sure. I think the best way to get rid of affirmative action is to finally call the liberal's bluff: absolute affirmative action, everywhere - pre-schools, high schools, public schools, private schools, colleges, businesses, hospitals, everywhere. And absolute proportional representation. Include taxpayer subsidized "affordable housing" in every single neighborhood from sea to shining sea. Show the liberals where we're going. Show them it is entirely unescapable. Let their jaws drop. Let ourselves seem the more moral and enlightened ones, for a change. Then dare the Democrats to vote against it. Then watch the SWPLs and Asians flee the Democratic Party like mad screaming baboons.
My old friend Russell Kirk, the genius conservative philosopher, didn't start reading until he was 7, yet went on to write about 30 books and thousands of articles. He never talked a lot, either, except when he gave a speech or told one of his ghostly tales on Halloween.
IQ tests at such an early age are a ridiculous status obsession. Free the children!
-A good public school is far more diverse - in the positive, undebased sense of the word - than a Manhattan private school.-
For liberals, diversity (and public school) is for Other People.
"Unless Feynman was playing some sort of joke on the tester, I'd guess it's just a misprint. The real score might have been 215 or (more likely) 251, though probably not 512.."
Feynman was a late talker and reader like Einstein, but by the time he was a senior in a NYC high school he was winning city wide math contests by remarkable margins -- so says Wikipedia. He also won the Putnam prize in College, which you can do only if you are at least 5 sigma above average in math ability. I have no doubt that between the time of being a mute 3 year old and becoming a high school math whiz that Feynman, maybe around the age of 8 or so, was capable of scoring a 125 on an IQ test; however, this result just didn't happen to be predictive of his ultimate potential.
IQ tests are mostly predictive at young ages, but maybe for a few percent, it's not. Also, if a child has an oddly original way of parsing language, as Feynman apparently did throughout his life, the test might have seemed ridiculous. Who knows. But pointing to Feynman and saying we should spend 40 billion more dollars on California Hispanic grade schoolers because we might be overlooking some Mexican Einstein is dumb. It's more cost efficient to concentrate on smaller populations with exceptional average IQs like the Jews or big populations with somewhat above average intelligence like the Chinese, or even modest size populations with average IQ like the Mormons to mine for gifted mathematicians and scientists.
Its telling that there are more than ten times as many Mexicans as Jews, but there are 10 times as many famous Jewish mathematicians as notable Mexican mathematicians, and some of the famous Mexican mathematicians (8 in all) listed in Wikipedia appear to have Jewish or European names.
Steve Wood --
The appeal of the city can be seen in any HGTV (Home and Garden Television, also known as "Home and Gay" for all the gay people on it) show about various White couples with or without kids seeking homes in the cities.
The idea is, they are "not" the "boring people in the suburbs" but "hip and cool" folks with much higher STATUS than suburbanites.
The ERB is not used for private school admissions. It is used once students are admitted; I remember taking it, beginning in second grade.
As for the rube upthread who doesn't know why people want to stay in civilization instead of raising their children in the arid, plastic, bad facsimile of human life that is a "good" suburb, if you have to ask I guess you'll never know.
The real question isn't why people want to stay in the real world and resist being deported to the comfortable concentration camps/ reservations for white people, it's why they aren't founding schools to serve their needs. It's very strange. My exclusive, expensive, elite, etc SF private school was founded in 1974. Two other such schools were founded around the same time in SF. I wouldn't send my children to what these schools have turned into, but I am pretty despairing that no one is interested in founding new, good schools. What happened in a generation?
Frank Rich bangs on about the importance of pubic schools - but his kids went to Dalton.
Smart Whites should spend their extra money trying to have MORE children, not better children.
Trying to have better children by investing money in their education is throwing your money down a rathole for the most part.
Maybe it will lead to more eugenic mating if Johnny and Jennifer aren't exposed to a bunch of low IQ minorities they could, in theory, race mix with.
But that's the only real advantage I can think of.
And if that's your goal, wouldn't it be a lot easier and cheaper just to raise them as racists?
A white couple with 4 children is twice as likely to produce a genius than a white couple with 2 children.
That's something to think about.
The ERB is not used for private school admissions. It is used once students are admitted; I remember taking it, beginning in second grade.
You are mistaken. See for yourself.
http://www.dalton.org/information/admission/first.asp
http://www.spenceschool.org/data/files/gallery/AdmissionsFileGallery/CklstK_20091.pdf
http://www.trinityschoolnyc.org/podium/default.aspx?t=125497
What kind of name is Rosenblum?
"a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side which to which the husband succeeded when his mother passed away": to imagine that you can avoid the development of an aristocracy based on inheritance it to fly in the face of human nature.
I've been to New York (haven't we all). I didn't see too many white people. Even fewer white kids, I am sure.
You must not have been there lately. Manhattan below 96th Street on the East Side and even further uptown on the West Side is now overwhelmingly white and affluent. There are yuppies pushing their kids in strollers everywhere. It's almost completely different from the city I moved to 20 years ago. Speaking of which ...
As for the rube upthread who doesn't know why people want to stay in civilization instead of raising their children in the arid, plastic, bad facsimile of human life that is a "good" suburb, if you have to ask I guess you'll never know.
[Ahem] I lived in New York for 10 years - New York, that is, a REAL city, not some tiny faux-Eastern imitation on a few quake-prone hills in California. I am quite familiar with the advantages of city life and the tendency of city dwellers to call the suburbs "arid" and "plastic." However, I have yet to have an urbanite actually articulate what they mean by those words because they themselves don't know. They're just buzzwords city people like to throw around to make themselves feel superior.
For liberals, diversity (and public school) is for Other People.
You misunderstood what I meant by "diversity" (lower-case "d"). I live in a town with a top-10 public school system. The town is very affluent, of course, and overwhelmingly white. Nevertheless, there are a few scattered neighborhoods with slightly lower housing prices where people who are middle or even lower-middle class live. (Not many working class people left in town these days.) Futhermore, because it's a large town, the schools contain a full complement of the usual school types - jocks, nerds, outsiders, preppies, theater types. Kids who go through the local school system will not be exposed to Diversity (upper-case "D"), but they will meet a much wider range of people than they would in the hothouse environment of an elite urban private school.
Things like this are why I am so glad I was raised in Queens and not on the Upper West Side.
If the women in these articles had any brains they would move away from Manhattan to a place where their husbands salary (if they have a husband and if the husband has a steady job) could support the family, then home school their children. Even in these elite private schools and gifted programs, the kids get a pitiful amount of academic instruction, all in a group setting where your kid has the teacher's direct attention for maybe 10 minutes a day, if for that long. The textbooks are all standardized.
At home under your supervision, you could probably get your child of somewhat above average intelligence through a 4th grade curriculum by the time he is 8. And all the extra attention from a parent (someone who feels a personal stake in the child's outcome) might even boost his IQ 10 points or so -- remember, IQ is at least somewhat dependent on environment.
Of course one advantage of the Dalton is that your kid can experiment with drugs and sex before age 12. Now isn't that special.
Feyman achieved a top score in the Putnam mathematical competition for his year and was named a Putnam fellow.
I don't think that's a possible achievement for someone with a 125 IQ.
Good point that a huge number of middle class white people who live in Manhattan now can only do so because of inherited rent control apts. I know people who have 3rd generation apartments originally rented by their garment worker grandparents in what were slums but that are now fantastically expensive areas.
Alright, I'll take a shot at articulating what I mean.
I think the burbs are pretty great for Northern Europeans protties who are introverted and/or satisfied by their families and coworkers forming nearly all of their social interaction. They are nice for people who like to be home and who are happiest with an environment they can exert the maximum amount of control over.
The thing is, not everyone is like that, and oddly enough, a lot of us who aren't like that were ethnically cleansed from the Northeastern cities That's why my family ended up in SF, which I agree is secondrate and kinda twee, but most of us ended up in the burbs. If you are the kind of the person (generally white ethnic and Catholic) who needs a high level of social interaction and find controlled environments icky and menacing, what are you going to do? Well you're going to move into what is available to you in the burbs. And that is: shopping; local politics dominated by soulless developers; shit you gotta drive to; age-segregated children's activities that cost a lot of money and lend themselves to nutbar status competition; useless hamster-wheel PTA activities. These activities are, indeed, arid, plastic, and I'll add soul-destroying.
There is no civitas out there. Living outside of civilization is fine for people who like that, but for those of us who want to be part of a polis it sucks.
And as for the anonymous who thinks that the ladies should just move out and homeschool, I did that. It's grueling. I don't blame people who can't hack it. Go find a nice homeschool mommy and take her to lunch.
"As for the rube upthread who doesn't know why people want to stay in civilization instead of . . . ."
By all means, stay right where you are. Believe me, you've found your proper place.
--Arid, plastic, suburban rube
Steve from Orlando said
> NYC liberals actually pro-create? I thought they were all gay or DINKs. <
Nobody said Jewish mommas aren't still poppin' 'em out.
Steve Wood said
> I understand why a 25-year-old wants to live in the city. I can't figure out why anyone over 30 with children would want to. <
Remember what bank robber Willie Sutton said. "Because that's where the money is."
> I live in a town with a top-10 public school system. The town is very affluent, of course, and overwhelmingly white [...T]he schools contain a full complement of the usual school types - jocks, nerds, outsiders, preppies, theater types. Kids who go through the local school system will not be exposed to Diversity (upper-case "D"), but they will meet a much wider range of people <
An interesting point. I believe whites are much more diverse in the genuine sense than NAMs are. Despite the Orwellian use of the word "vibrant" to describe the latter, they all seem to me to have a boring sameness and mediocrity.
Anonymous said
> Living outside of [urban] civilization is fine for people who like that, but for those of us who want to be part of a polis it sucks. <
Most people embrace the city for money and entertainment, and hate having to live "asses and elbows" with other people. From Thomas Jefferson on, the usual American take on city living is that "the polis" (I guess you just mean bunches of people, since suburbia and rural areas have local government) is precisely what's oppressive about it; it's a necessary evil to be endured in order to obtain economic values - a finer division of labor, larger economies of scale - but no attraction. That's why most people, after they make their money in the city, retire to the country. (New Yorkers have Florida, though weather is a large factor in choosing that particular destination.) I am reminded of what's said about American pioneer Daniel Boone: whensoever he saw the smoke of a new chimney miles away on the horizon, he would consider his place too crowded to live in any longer, and move. Question: how can you stand the constant noise, for one thing? Do you use earplugs in the City That Never Sleeps or what?
If you are the kind of the person (generally white ethnic and Catholic) who needs a high level of social interaction.
Would that include the Irish?
In the RoI there is only one large city - Dublin.
Much of the population is spread around small rural villages which are smaller and less densely populated than an American suburb.
Furthermore most Irish immigrants historically would have come from these scattered, isolated village communities. Which were even more representitive of Ireland in the past than now.
Well, these kids will all end up in academia since these kids will end up with poor social skills, and will need to associate with people like themselves to neuter this personality disadvantage.
Rather than playing with other kids, these kids are studying by themselves which will hurt them down the line since they have no experience dealing with people, or working with people.
Remember "new white flight" article about white families fleeing Asians since the Asians work too hard at school, raising the academic bar, leaving no time for sports?
Well the white kids moving away will have lower test scores (as you've shown) than the Asian kids, but the white kids will end up as better natural leaders, kinda like Charlie Croker, making the smart kids to do work for the jocks, kinda like JoJo Johannson.
Or the smart kids can go into academia.
"Well, these kids will all end up in academia since these kids will end up with poor social skills, and will need to associate with people like themselves to neuter this personality disadvantage."
Social skills such as what? Listening to Britney Spears with friend and wasting time?
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