Kevin Drum writes in Mother Jones a bit of boilerplate Conventional Wisdom, subversively self-parodied, however, by the caption for the photo intended to demonstrate what effective early childhood education would look like.
Day Care, the Final Frontier
—By Kevin Drum| Mon Apr. 15, 2013 12:13 PM PDT
In 2011, Jon Cohn wrote a story called "The Two Year Window," about new research demonstrating the importance of the first two years of a child's life. Roughly speaking, most child care that's average or better is probably OK. But down in the bottom third, conditions are often bad enough to cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level. One third is a lot of kids.
Appropriately, two years later Cohn is back with a follow-up, "The Hell of American Day Care." Children who get proper attention and interaction, he says, "tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it":
The caption in Mother Jones reads, "Unfortunately, this is the exception in America, not the rule." Evidently, the blonde teaching the blonde is the exception, unfortunately, not the rule.
By the way, all this talk about how there's a "two year window" right after birth to equalize IQs, which makes "Day Care, the Final Frontier," is so 2005. By 2015, I predict, the new conventional wisdom will become that the Final Frontier is Prenatal Care, providing a window exactly eight months and twenty-nine days long.
apologies if this posts twice...these idiots will do anything to avoid grasping the obvious. First it was universal kindergarten that would shrink "the gap". Then it was preschool. Now its those all important first two years.
ReplyDeleteMaybe one day they'll keep going - past the first two years, past in utero, back to before the baby is even conceived. Then we're into genetics and now we're all on the same page!
This is how libs create more jobs, more committees, more research money, more bureaucracies, etc.
ReplyDeleteThere's a two year window for this, for that, for whatever...
and something just has to be done.
So, it seems liberals are selective nurturists. It's nurture over nature BUT nurture is effective only during 2 yrs, after which, everything is sealed.
What is the hidden agenda here? Is it trying to come up with excuses to take black babies away from black mothers? If those early 2 yrs are SO CRUCIAL, it means blacks should really be raised by others than blacks.
ReplyDeleteSo, all this 'two year' talk could be code-word for 'blacks suck at early childhood parenting'.
And maybe that black woman on the bus done understood this. After all, she was hollering for someone to 'grab my mofo baby'.
Until I read the title, I didn't get the point about the caption. Snorf.
ReplyDeleteWhat they really want is to take money from the non-NAM middle class. Period.
ReplyDeleteThey don't believe early education will help. They already know Head Start is a waste. They are only pretending to believe the aid must come w/in the first two years in order to be effective and LASTING. It's a money grab to create public sector jobs and to make even more people beholden to the progs come election time.
Remember Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451?" Bradbury saw this coming...one of his characters says prophesies that "they'll be taking them from the cradle soon." So true if we let them.
This is the kind of thing I think of when some visitors to this blog and to other HBD blogs say things like "Okay, so I agree there are likely large gaps that exist that probably genetic, but what good does it do to talk about it or make a big deal about it?"
Got your answer, fools? Don't think you live in a society where such a thing can't happen, a world in which Big Brother tells you what's best for your kids even to the point of taking them from you to educate them in ways they profess to be "good for them."
Look at what they already manage to do by lying about what is true and what isn't.
Almost every mainstream discussion about anything IQ- or HBD-related is more or less a 'The Emperor's New Clothes' phenomenon these days.
ReplyDeleteSomeone (not me, mind you) should write a book: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Only 8% of the students in the CPS (Chicago Public School) system are white. About half the teachers are white (last time I bothered to check, anyway). Eyeballing the teachers marching in the front row during their recent strike action, one got the impression of a herd of whale-like beings of a darker hue. Most seemed to talk in Ebonics. Their union leader, the one they voted in, is so bloated that it's hard to see how she can actually walk. So, would any sensible person entrust their very own young children to a group of people that just don't inspire much confidence? You wouldn't get the blonde in the picture, that's a safe bet.
ReplyDeleteBoston Marathon:
ReplyDeleteOne hour ago there was quite a difference between CNN and BBC World. CNN was showing two explosions and stating that the explosions took place near flags of different countries and that also a lot of muslims were victims of this attack. (Yeah, right.) BBC World was showing videos from a bombing of the Boston marathon and injured people in wheel chairs.
Obama's speech might have been delivered by a functionary.
My Guess: Islamists.
- Western country
- Lots of cameras and people
- Bombs went off too late
- Bombs could have done more damage
- from Germany
PS: There's footage on CNN from a camera on the finish line. Right at the beginning but after the first explosion, a guy in red clothing is running in front of the camera looking at his wristwatch. Talk about priorities.
Off topic, but after Newtown Obama said about how he was "tired of going to these" funerals and it was a call to action on gun control... is he tired of funerals do to Islamists too, and is this a call to action for Muslim control?
ReplyDeleteThe caption suggest MJ finds all-white school environments distressingly exceptional.
ReplyDeleteMaybe environmental conditions in the womb, that somehow both parents contribute to, that are in no way related to genetics. No sir.
ReplyDeleteSteve Barnes wrote a good science fiction/horror novel on this 'two-year intervention' stuff: _Charisma_.
ReplyDeleteWhat America needs: More makework positions for the diverstocracy and their vassals. I doubt that the search for the gap's etiology will ever reach into the prenatal period.
ReplyDeleteWhy not? For propriety's sake, the practitioners of prenatal interventions would need to obtain educations that weed out the abjectly useless.
-The Judean People's Front
My Guess: Islamists...Bombs went off too late
ReplyDeleteThe bombs detonated with lots of people in wheel chairs around. If they were injured soldiers, perhaps it was intentional and the timing was spot on.
Steve, there is a way the Conventional Wisdom could push the critical developmental period to exactly two generations before birth, and manage to avoid implying that bad outcomes come from bad genes: epigenetics. According to one theory of epigenetics that I was just taught in medical school, someone's behavior can affect the next two generations (it involves DNA methylation). According to another theory, the way your DNA gets methylated affects your progeny two generations hence, and the effects actually skip your own children. This may be studied throughly someday, but scientists generally prefer to start projects that can be published end within their lifetimes.
ReplyDeleteIf patterns of heritability along these lines prove to be important for human IQ, that puts a dent in claims that genetic "base pair" code influences IQ. Yes, it would mean there is a non-base pair genetic influence on IQ, namely methylation. But methylation is less permanent across many generations is the base pair code.
By 2015, I predict, the new conventional wisdom will become that the Final Frontier is Prenatal Care, providing a window exactly eight months and twenty-nine days long.
ReplyDeleteIf that's happens, at least there's a chance of it going full circle so that by 2025, they'll say it's all dependent on the quality of the sperm and egg.
Mother Jones wants to talk about poor black kids as the justification of the policy. But for for any Mother Jones' reader too stupid to realize it, they show the picture that they are going to get free day care.
ReplyDeleteIt's all part of Mother Jones being a publicity agency in the employ of the Democrats.
I am moving to Idaho where there are lots of blondes.
ReplyDelete"By 2015, I predict, the new conventional wisdom will become that the Final Frontier is Prenatal Care, providing a window exactly eight months and twenty-nine days long."
ReplyDeleteTo be a good citizen you must either use the prescribed* Prenatal Care or abort** that fetus promptly lest it become another Brad Paisley.
*Complete with audio stimulation including approved cultural immersion and lectures by President Obama.
**And do it right people. We can't have another fucking muppet doctor embarrassing the Pro-Choice movement.
Imagine what Norman Borlaug's first few years of life were like on a farm in Iowa near the Minnesota border. No early childhood education. Yet, he managed despite living through the depression etc. And if you don't want a white guy example, then consider the far more celebrated but not more accomplished George W. Carver. Evidently poverty in early childhood can't be too debilitating. Mozart's early childhood? Joan of Arc's early childhood? How did they manage to escape permanent brain damage without early childhood ed?
ReplyDelete"By 2015, I predict, the new conventional wisdom will become that the Final Frontier is Prenatal Care, providing a window exactly eight months and twenty-nine days long."
ReplyDeletetime travel, that's where the racism be at.
Well, they're right. This does look a lot better than throwing babies across the bus while screaming m***f**** (sp) at people disrespecting you.
ReplyDeleteClearly there needs to be more niceness and less screaming.
On/Off Topic:
ReplyDeleteThere was an educational fad in the late 60's/early 70's for teaching reading called ITA that I learned in First grade on a Long Island, NY school.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
Despite being subjected to what amounted to a foreign language we all turned out to be good readers. If it happened in a minority district, there would have been lawsuits, apologies, and reparations later. it's amazing that education is subject to such fads.
"I am moving to Idaho where there are lots of blondes."
ReplyDeleteState's full. Keep Out.
I was blonde when I was little. Should they have changed my teachers as I darkened? Did I suffer from brunettism? Should I be compensated? Was it a hate crime?
ReplyDeleteEpigenetics Anon,
ReplyDeleteWhat's the evidence that prompted the two generation epigenetic influence hypothesis that was unexplained by genetics? Has someone found differential expression of methyltransferases or methylation in sperm or egg that correspond various activities?
No one wants to do a three generation experiment, which is mighty convenient. Yet, as the evo biologists tell us, sperm is cheap. It'd be pretty easy to prove paternal epigenetic inheritance.
Looks like the liberal creationist version of the God of the Gaps.
Reminds me of the war among Democrats about who gets to divvy up the education dollars in CA.
ReplyDelete"Maybe one day they'll keep going - past the first two years, past in utero, back to before the baby is even conceived. Then we're into genetics and now we're all on the same page!"
ReplyDeleteCould not be more precise! Liberal bigot, it is the gene that gives the edge.
I wonder how likely it is that the person we eventually decide did it will actually be guilty. The stories of Richard Jewel and Steven Hatfill do not inspire confidence in the authorities' interest and competence in finding the truth. Nor does the large number of terrorism suspects they're afraid to give real trials to.
ReplyDeleteWorse, I wonder how the eventual decision about who must be to blame will be affected by political considerations--would It be more useful to shut up the right on guns or the left on war-on-terror abuses? Do we need a causus belli with Iran or Syria to achieve some current political goals?
I very much hope they find the guys who did this, and either lock the bastards up forever or hang them. But the last decade makes it impossible for me to believe that someone is guilty of this crime just because some administration officials say so--I'd really like to see a real live trial with normal rules of evidence and laws, just like they have in civilized countries.
Pre-K is a just pretext to expand government and have mothers hand their children over to care providers at an early age. It's a few more years to brainwash the developmentally able and coddle the developmentally challenged.
ReplyDeleteThe comments under the MJ article were a shock to the system after spending so much time in the HBD sphere. Those readers are aggressively and emotionally connected to the idea that children with an IQ around 85 can be helped to perform close to that of a 100 level IQ student if they are just nurtured enough while young, and if you happen to think that the benefits are negligible, you are a big, bad racist meanie.
the new conventional wisdom will become that the Final Frontier is Prenatal Care, providing a window exactly eight months and twenty-nine days long.
ReplyDeleteThose who do not meet the state-mandated standards, or who are simply inconvenient to the mother, will have their spines severed by the good Dr. Gosnell and get thrown in the trash.
Nothing to see here, no story, everyone move along!
I suspect an important part of the support for preschool programs is some combination of:
ReplyDeletea. The desire to have kids from the worst families get some kind of exposure to decent people, and get an occasional helping of safety and a hot meal now and again.
b. The desire to provide free daycare for women who can then hopefully get/keep jobs. This could easily morph into a substantial middle-class benefit, with doctors and lawyers angling to get some kind of subsidy for putting their kids in a good preschool so they can keep working full time.
Neither of these are exactly bad ideas, either. I find it very hard to argue against (a), just because the kids with the worst parents genuinely could use any help we can give them. (Taking them from their worthless parents and giving them to decent people to raise would be a bigger help, but that implies a pretty disturbing concentratin of power in the state.)
As far as (b) goes: to the extent we make it more feasilble for smart professional women to have kids and keep their careers, we probably encourage more babies from the sort of people we'd like to have as parents of our next generation.
You know, it just dawned on me that if a negress is screaming about her "m*****-f***ing" child, and if the child is a boy, then she's getting into Jocasta/Oedipus territory.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you'd call it if the child were a girl, however.
If you are looking for a nice video introduction to the ideas discussed in the HBD-sphere, I recommend The Teaching Company course "Intelligence and the human brain", which is surprisingly non-PC and dispenses some red-pill wisdom. The lecturer is prof. Richard Haier.
ReplyDeleteAre they really scared if you go back 8 months and 30 days that you might come to the inappropriate conclusion that we would be better off not having NAM babies to worry about in the first place?
ReplyDeleteYou know, it just dawned on me that if a negress is screaming about her "m*****-f***ing" child, and if the child is a boy, then she's getting into Jocasta/Oedipus territory.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you'd call it if the child were a girl, however.
This was the late Birdman Bryant's assertion; that the ubiquitous black insult of "motherfucker" came about from all the yoofs filling for their missing daddies, as it were.