36 PRETEND GENESBurt’s ideas were shared with a number of psychologists in Amer i ca and
elsewhere in Eu rope. Th ey have run like a river delta through social, family,
and educational policy on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. Th e idea
that psychologists can mea sure innate potential is widespread today. One
example, among many, is the advice to parents given by the Th eSchoolRun
. com, a private com pany selling school preparation material to families.
“Most secondary schools use Cognitive Abilities Tests, CATs, to test
general intelligence and to stream overall or set for certain subjects,” it
says. It goes on, “CATs are used to give a snapshot of a child’s potential,
what they could achieve and how they learn best.” Moreover, there is no
point in trying to coach your child for them. “Th e tests are designed to
be taken without any revision or preparation so they can assess a child’s
potential in his or her ability to reason. CATs are not testing children’s
knowledge and understanding as a math or En glish exam might, so they
can’t ‘learn’ how to answer the questions.” Th eir psychological witness
explains, “I think helping your child will not have anything other than
an insignifi cant impact on the actual per for mance in the CATs test.”
Such sites are, of course, well meaning. But they are misguided by what
they have heard in some streams of the psychological lit er a ture and are na-
ïve about their ideological roots. Th ey are echoes of Cyril Burt’s warning:
“Th e facts of ge ne tic in equality are something that we cannot escape.”^1
Today such interest tends to be expressed in the more benign terms
of “personalized learning.” But it remains rooted in the same under lying
ge ne tic model. Plomin’s advice to the United Kingdom’s Parliamentary
Select Committee on Education (December 4, 2013) was that “50% of the
variance is due to ge ne tic diff erences... every body knows that.” Parents,
teachers, and others do not usually ask how psychologists can know these
things. But that is what this chapter is about—in some detail.
KNOWING ABOUT GENESTh e statements about IQ by Burt and today’s behavioral ge ne ticists are
de cades apart. But they are based on essentially the same narrow concept
of genes and the same fl awed assumptions about how they enter into the
development of form and variation. Th e basic prob lem is that their infer-This content downloaded from 139.184.14.159 on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 13:51:26 UTChttp://www.ebook3000.com