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How dumb of Cambridge to rely on an intelligence test
A very confused idea took root in 19th and 20th-century thinking, with tragic consequences. It's the idea that meritocracy is fair, and that we can have both meritocracy and fairness at the same time.
This is nonsense, of course. Merit is not distributed fairly and the rewards of merit will also therefore be unfairly distributed. But along with some of the higher apes we seem to have an innate sense of fairness, meaning equality. Like chimpanzees, we instinctively feel we are of equal worth and that we should, in fairness, be treated equally. Perhaps we should, but life isn't like that; monkeys probably have to learn the hard way too.
This old-fashioned muddle is what lies behind the ludicrous developments in education in this country. We have reached a point when Cambridge, our best university, feels obliged to set an intelligence test, announced last week, to cut a swathe through the many thousands of candidates with masses of meaningless A grades in the debased A-level exam.
This is partly Cambridge's own fault for abandoning in 1987, in a fit of astonishingly muddled thinking, its old entrance exam and using only A-level results. The old exam served very well to select, from the many intelligent teenagers who applied, the very few suited to academic education.
Nobody thought then that this had much to do with A-level results, which didn't then (and don't now) test for a truly intellectual cast of mind or true academic ability.
Even more than Cambridge University's loss of nerve, however, the chaos of university entrance today has much more to do with idiotic government intervention -largely Labour, but also Conservative -that tried to impose this notion of fairness on universities in the belief that practically everybody ought to have, and is therefore suited to, a university education.
There follows the government's daft plan to send 50% of school-leavers to university. This is already well on the way to destroying Britain's universities - hence Cambridge's desperate remedy -and is weighing down thousands of sensible, capable young things with pointless debt for pointless degrees.
It is also destroying Tony Blair's chances of a reconciliation with his party this week, post-Iraq. Ironically, to pay for this overexpansion of student numbers, the government is proposing higher tuition fees. That infuriates the egalitarians in Blair's party.
In our culture the best kind of merit is intelligence. In other eras other kinds, such as being amazing at sword play or killing foreigners, were more useful and much more highly rewarded. Even today, being brilliant at violent physical exertion is still a very well-rewarded form of merit -as with football or boxing.
But what most people want is intelligence. Not to have it is to be a loser in the lottery of life.
So to suggest to large numbers of people -probably 85% of the population -that they are not intelligent enough to go to a serious university is to tell them that they have all drawn a losing ticket. This is clearly judgmental, exclusive and unacceptable and it is a truth too beastly even for the Tory party to name.
However, my view is that it is not as beastly as it sounds. It is not, I believe, to decry the intelligence -the merit -of all those people. What makes this subject painful is our confusion and our unquestioned assumptions about the nature of intelligence. I think it might be less painful if people thought and spoke more carefully -more intelligently -about it.
This is an area where fools rush in and angels fear to tread, and I certainly intend to tackle it. For it seems obvious to me (and science appears to be confirming this) that intelligence is not monolithic at all. It appears in different forms.
That is not to agree with the comforting old platitude about everybody being good at something. Sadly, that's not true. There are, at the extremes, total winners and total losers. But I believe increasingly that intelligence is highly specialised and that people who are gifted in one respect may not be so in others.
Those who are good at verbal reasoning may be very poor at understanding numbers.
There are even autistic people who are very limited cognitively in most respects but outstanding in one, such as calculation, like Raymond Babbitt in the film Rain Man.
The general intelligence quotient, the old IQ test, is very crude, as people on the left have always argued (though it ought to be admitted that, crudely speaking, it is still the best indicator of future success across a population).
It tests a range of cognitive skills and takes an average of the result; obviously it has considerable use, but it tends to underestimate people with very uneven abilities -those who are extremely high in one area, but poor in others.
And these people are sometimes the individuals with most -the highest intelligence, the highest merit -to offer. So a low general IQ, though discouraging, does not mean a person lacks intelligence. That person might in some respects be quite or even very intelligent.
I've been forced to think about this very hard in my own life. My sister suffered brain damage at birth and as a result has learning difficulties (or a mental handicap, as people used to say). Yet she has one or two very exceptional cognitive abilities, although other difficulties make it more or less impossible for her to make much use of them.
Others among my family and friends are pretty intelligent, by conventional standards, but others still, though apparently very intelligent, have astonishing cognitive blips and are therefore what would once have been called "thick". It is interesting to see, as I have, detailed results of children's cognitive testing that show one score way high and another way low -something that almost all schools would fail to pick up.
Then again, we can all think of people whose abilities have somehow fallen on thorny ground -not just through lack of opportunity, or bad luck, but through the difficulties of their own temperaments. Personality is crucial to intelligence.
You could almost say that personality is an aspect of intelligence. It determines what use you make of the cognitive aptitudes you have.
It is a foolish misunderstanding of intelligence to relate it to a university upper second and force everybody to jump through the wrong hoops. Presumably it has to do with another egalitarian error -that everybody must have the same status and everyone must therefore be a "professional". The notion has been dumbed down accordingly; we are all professional now, or think we ought to be.
This is a tragic and cruel misunderstanding of the varieties of human ability.
What our education system ought to be doing is trying to develop our many and various aptitudes -most of them useful, interesting and worthy of respect - rather than trying to push people into thinking they are something they are not.
It is very unfair to us all, to our different hopes of self-expression and achievement and to real respect for our true merits. Cambridge University's rather desperate brain teaser test ought to ring alarm bells everywhere.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 28, 2003 | Comments (0)
What every woman wants: her very own Carole Caplin
The antics of Carole Caplin, the pneumatic lifestyle guru of the prime minister's wife, have given us many months of pure comedy. We shall certainly miss her, and the many laughs we have had at her and Cherie Booth's expense, now that she has been stripped of her Downing Street security pass. I cannot help hoping, however wrong it may be, that the sultry stylist does decide to do the dastardly thing, despite her protestations, and spill the Blair beans in a tasteless bestseller.
Otherwise we shall hear no more giggly things about her naked showers with Cherie, repulsing toxins and releasing sexual energy, or her up-to-the-minute advice about pointy white ankle boots, lymphatic drainage, primal screaming and the constant need for a "pamper".
We may have laughed at her, and still more at Cherie Booth for being taken in by her, but actually Carole Caplin is not merely a comic figure. She is something much more iconic, a truly contemporary heroine. Carole Caplin stands for and lives off our obsession with ourselves and our growing refusal to let go of our youth and beauty in the course of nature.
People claim to be mystified by Cherie Booth's uncritical acceptance of such a preposterous person, but actually it is easy to understand. Women everywhere, despite our growing power and independence, despite our longings for liberation from the way we look, are becoming more and more insecure. Our great new power, by some paradox, has coincided with an even greater new insecurity. Millions of women, many of them much more sensible than Booth, are becoming more and more dependent on a whole lot of self-enhancing mumbo jumbo -just like the late Diana, Princess of Wales, another icon of our times.
This is another paradox; at a time when science is making truly astonishing progress, the public imagination is gripped ever more firmly by non scientific, anti-scientific and pre-scientific fads. Superstition continues to usurp science.
There was a time, in the bad old unliberated days, when it didn't really matter what a prime minister's wife looked like -or a princess for that matter. Even if she had no other job than that of prime minister's wife, it still didn't matter.
Mrs Harold Wilson clearly didn't care much, nor did Mrs James Callaghan, and Mrs John Major was content to look unobtrusively smart.
Barbara Bush, when her husband was president of the United States, said something which endeared her to me for ever. Someone told her people were saying she was frumpy and didn't even bother to buy good clothes. "I do buy lovely clothes," she replied pleasantly. "It's just that they don't look good on me." Yet she, quite obviously, was not a woman lacking in self-respect (or humour).
Something revolutionary has happened to women's relationships with their bodies since then. In the 1970s, in an aggressive wave of feminism, an influential book called Our Bodies, Ourselves encouraged women to accept their bodies as they actually were. There was no need, the sisters argued, to strip our skin of hair and paint the signs of extreme youth and sexual arousal over our faces, in order to turn ourselves into objects of desire. Give up shaving. Give up make-up. That was the way to discover who we really were, what we really wanted and what we could really do.
It was an absurd extreme, of course. But now we have the extreme opposite: our bodies seem to have become ourselves in just the opposite way from what the feminists had in mind.
It represents a seismic change of consciousness when a supposedly serious woman like Cherie Booth, well into middle age, cannot travel without her own hairdresser to tease a remarkably ordinary hairstyle (which must be well within the reach of any high street salon trainee), and carries on just like Diana with an entourage of touchy-feely body toners, body shapers, body painters, image enhancers and all the rest of the rapacious beauty crew. And that's not counting the paranormal advisers, the fortune tellers and the psychics.
It was odd enough in a beautiful woman like Diana, whose role in life was ceremonial. It is very odd indeed in a clever woman who was never beautiful, never elegant, but who -without any of those advantages and in competition with women who did have them -won and kept the love of a good and successful husband and landed a prestigious job as well. Why should such a woman carry on like a superstitious and ageing starlet? I cannot believe it is simply thwarted vanity gone mad.
Is it just because it's possible? Is it because so many real discoveries have been made in the science of beautification and rejuvenation? Botox really does iron out lines on your face and lasers can do all kinds of clever things permanently.
On the other hand, most beauty treatment is pure moonshine and most women know, deep down, that there is only so much your daily hairdresser can do for your flyaway hair, and that when they pay for expensive packaging, or for a stylist like Caplin, they are paying for a fantasy.
It is no doubt partly because beauty treatments, even the most extreme, have been democratised like foreign travel and balsamic vinegar. There was a time when baths of asses' milk and potions of dissolved pearls were only for the grandest of the grandes horizontales. Now many women can afford the modern-day equivalents and most women aspire to them. "Because you're worth it", as the clever advertisement puts it.
But why does a woman feel worth less without all this? Can it really be that her self-respect depends on something so extremely unliberated, as the sisters used to say?
The answer, I suspect, lies in the lyrics of the old song: "Keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved". And not only loved, but noticed and needed. It applies particularly to women, still. What young and beautiful means, in every study that's been done, is fertile. Beauty in women is associated with high oestrogen production and youth -with a big forehead, childish features, full lips, dewy skin, a slender waist, abundant hair.
Beauty is so powerfully attractive to us, however much of an optional extra it might seem, because deep in our dark evolutionary unconscious is an obsession with reproduction, with reproductive success. That's our destiny. And that's why older men are less tormented by the loss of youth and can pass for attractive; they are still fertile.
What everyone is after is not the face of beauty so much as the face of youthful fertility. Thousands of years of civilisation and a few decades of feminism have done little to change this depressing fact. Anyone doubting it should have watched last week's dazzling and raunchy BBC television version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Julie Walters's Wife of Bath was an electrifying, assertive woman who loved both power and sex and had no intention of giving up either. She certainly would have employed someone like Caplin as a talisman against age. What a pity that we have no Chaucer living today to write The Lifestyle Guru's Tale; she is as typical of our pilgrimage today as the Knight and the Pardoner and the Franklin were of his.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 21, 2003 | Comments (0)
Give divorce a bad name and marriage will benefit
Breaking up is hard to do, as the old song says. When I first heard it, I assumed it was about the pain of lovers parting. But the real, lasting anguish of breaking up is when it involves parents parting and breaking up their home, their children's lives, their natural daily closeness to them, their everything most precious.
I have often been amazed, watching friends' divorces, that people can bring themselves to do it; I don't mean that I don't understand the temptation, the longing to be free of a miserable marriage. I mean that I can't understand anyone deciding in reality to face the agony of divorce when there are young children involved.
I was reminded of this by an extraordinary piece of writing by Bob Geldof in The Sunday Times last week taken from Children and Their Families, a new collection of essays published by the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group. Otherwise rather academic and dry, the book addresses the question of how, and how far, children's relationships with "non-resident" or "non-caretaking" parents should be preserved.
That is all important and worthy; it is now likely that 28% of children will experience the divorce of their parents, and that is not counting the parents who have never married. Then there are all sorts of awkward questions about the rights and duties of egg and sperm donor parents, or long-since-gone baby-fathers or "unfit" parents. And at this time of half-wild children whose teachers find they are often barely house-trained when they arrive at school, it must be right to examine again the role of what you might call live-out parents.
However, none of those important questions interested me nearly as much as the passion of Geldof's chapter. He calls his essay "a sometimes coherent rant", and it scorches the pages. His subject is the injustice done to men, as fathers, by divorce and family law, and the misery he felt when it overtook him and his much-loved children. His experience left him feeling "criminalised, belittled, worthless, powerless and irrelevant" -"lacerated by the law".
How can one disagree? I cannot count the men I have talked to about their misery after divorce, when enraged ex-wives refuse to let them see their children or sabotage arrangements; when they poison childish minds against their wicked dads, maybe even refuse to let them into their old home and threaten them with legal processes and loss of contact.
This is regardless of who is morally responsible for the divorce (for the divorce law is morally blind on this point) and indeed of what the courts have decided; fighting a wife who ignores court orders for access commonly makes things much worse and many men can't afford the time or money.
A bad father is worse than useless, but most men who long to be with their children are likely to be good-enough fathers. And in any case, children long for fathers, however imperfect, and need them. I never had one myself, at least not after the age of three, after his death, and have always longed for one; the lack and longing of a child who knows her father but loses touch with him, literally, must be infinitely greater.
For years now, fathers caught in such bitter struggles have felt that they receive little sympathy; public sympathy has tended to go to the mother, in and out of the divorce courts. Hence the emergence of activists like Geldof and groups such as Families Need Fathers. The mother has been seen as the more important parent biologically and socially -as a woman -and as the more vulnerable parent economically and socially -again as a woman. So loser takes all, in some cases at least. And this even though feminism has insisted fathers are just as good at childcare as women and that the sexes should be treated equally.
Geldof goes further. He argues that divorce for many women, but not for men and children, is free of consequences. "Why not divorce when there's no downside? If I was a woman I would. Indeed were I a woman and realised I could hop off with the new man/men, keep the house, keep the kids, give up work AND get paid ... for ever ... well, Hello Opportunity Knocks!"
It has always struck me, too, that as things are today a responsible hard working man has little incentive to get married. If his wife falls in love with someone else and decides he is more important than her marriage, she can in effect take away her husband's children, his home, most of his assets and much of his income, and behave extremely badly without any legal or social blame. Marriage has become meaningless when such injustices are all too common and unrestrained by law.
However, the terrible treatment of fathers that Geldof describes is hardly typical. It is only men with money and assets who can be exploited in this way: what's more, women with money are now beginning to find the same thing. The real problem in most divorces is lack of money. There is not, usually, enough to provide two acceptable homes and income for a broken family - most men (and women) don't have many assets to grab. What's surprising, and argues against Geldof, is that most divorces are sought by women despite the certainly that most of them will be much worse off, not better off.
The fact is that if there's only enough money for one home for the children, it will have to go to one partner. Of course many women, in all income brackets, are prepared to trample vengefully over their former husbands' love for their children, but many men behave just as badly, and it is hard for women to get redress in such cases as well. The courts cannot be expected to deal with the many and complex little cruelties and treacheries of most divorces.
Geldof is right in saying that something has gone wrong with marriage: marriage is no longer in any real sense a clear and binding contract with obvious and equal advantages and safeguards to both parties, although it ought to be said that there are still some reasonable legal safeguards; Geldof was able to get custody of his children in the end, for instance, and in a system truly biased against fathers and fairness he would not have done so. However, in abandoning any notion of blame or of sanctions, the law has abandoned any attempt to protect marriage.
But here the law is only following social change, as it always does and should.
Society as a whole has been, and is, throwing off the obligations of marriage.
More and more people are avoiding it altogether. Besides, and most importantly, the law cannot legislate people into being rich enough, or virtuous enough, to conduct a divorce unsullied by anger, vengefulness and selfishness. If it could, one probably wouldn't want it to; there are many evils that the law cannot reach, and should not try to, starting with human nature itself.
What is needed is not new legislation, but what John Stuart Mill spoke of as an important sanction in his essay On Liberty -"social disapprobation". That means public disapproval and social sanctions. People laugh these days at the old-fashioned disapproval which kept divorced people out of the royal enclosure at Ascot, for instance. Perhaps, oddly enough and in a different idiom, Geldof is the man to bring it back.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 14, 2003 | Comments (0)
A nationality test won't win the new Battle of Britain
At last! you might say. At last the government has decided to do something - or at least to talk of doing something - about asylum, immigration and the complex problems they impose upon Britain and Britishness.
So now we have an announcement that asylum applications to this country are "on target". We have talk of a Britishness test for becoming a citizen. Learning English is to be compulsory for anybody who wants a British passport, though they will only have to try to improve a bit.
It is much too little and far, far too late. Irreparable damage has been done. I was reminded of this obvious fact when reading the report into the murder of Victoria Climbie this summer. Her terrible death was, it seems to me, in some part due to this country's long and shameful failure to address our problems of immigration and multiculturalism.
Victoria and the woman who murdered her fell into a system which is overwhelmed by the needs of asylum seekers and foreigners. The London boroughs of Ealing, Brent and Haringey could not cope. "We lost our ability to be social workers," said the Brent duty team manager, "because of the time we had to spend dealing with asylum seekers - there were no additional resources to deal with it." At least 50% of social workers' time would be spent on unaccompanied minors.
In Haringey 160 different languages are spoken and 9% of the population is made up of asylum-seeking families. One worker said his team was "very, very swamped with work".
So intense was the workload that the authorities had to rely on agency workers plus social workers who had been trained overseas - far from ideal.
An Ealing social worker allocated to Victoria said she thought 60-70% of referrals of homeless families came from abroad. Another described difficulties and a lack of "clear protocols" for guidance in dealing with homeless people from abroad. In other words, they found it difficult to know how to deal with foreigners.
Communication is one obvious difficulty and language problems played some part in Victoria's fate. She and her murderer, Marie Therese Kouao, were both French speakers, but Kouao's English was quite good and many people who came into contact with Victoria spoke not to her but to Kouao.
Kouao exploited this, but was prepared to understand less English when it suited her. In one important assessment interview she refused to speak any English and would only talk to an interpreter. She insisted that the interpreter, not the social worker, filled in the assessment form.
Language problems can be disastrous. So can multiculturalism, or to be more precise, extreme cultural diversity. A (white) doctor who did her best to protect Victoria and was frustrated in her efforts to alert social workers (some of them black) to her grave concerns was asked whether race made any difference to how social workers responded. "Maybe," she replied. "Some social workers felt they knew more about black children than I did."
Anybody familiar with social services in big cities will know exactly what she meant. All kinds of perversities have sprung up under multiculturalism. There is reverse racism, of black against white, and of white people intimidated into agreeing that they cannot understand black people and are institutionally racist.
There is a strange kind of modern apartheid.
Counsel to the inquiry pointed out that the fear of being accused of racism can stop people acting when they would otherwise do so. Lord Laming, the presiding judge, tentatively agreed, mentioning the doctor quoted above. Laming also wrote of the clear dangers of making assumptions about different cultures and their different behavioural norms.
Several people who were supposed to have helped Victoria (black and white) made quite unjustified assumptions about African behaviour, which they believed (wrongly) had explained Victoria's unusual behaviour and the marks on her body.
Multiculturalism in Britain has actually promoted the idea that different standards apply to children from different cultures and that things which would be unacceptable for white children might be okay for black children.
These are only some of the many factors that contributed, more or less, to Victoria's death, but they cannot be ignored. "This is not an area," Laming drily wrote, "in which there is much scope for political correctness."
The government will respond to his report on the Climbie case next week with a green paper. It seems unlikely, on past form, that it will be courageous enough to rise above political correctness. Last week's announcements on immigration seem typically, tragically pusillanimous.
As for the claim that Britain's asylum figures are on target, the record of this government is such that very few people believe anything it says.
It may possibly be true that applications for asylum are down slightly. What people really care about, however, is how many people arrive here and stay, legally or illegally. The government has no idea. It only recently conceded there is a problem at all. But the numbers are enormous.
As for the Britishness test, the heart sinks. The most chilling comment on that was provided last week by Haibin Gao, a Chinese man who came here as a student seven years ago. He will be eligible to apply for British citizenship this year and runs an immigration advice service.
Gao sees very little point in the test. "I fail to appreciate what British culture is," he told the BBC. "There is no British culture as such - maybe 100 years ago there was such a thing, but not now." You can't blame him for taking such a view.
After all, schools, universities and training colleges for all the social services all teach this directly or implicitly. The public services only follow suit.
It is a world view that is ashamed of Britishness and has tried to belittle and suppress it - with considerable success. New arrivals know little of the best of British but the same is true of people born here, thanks to 30 years or more of negative propaganda, driven by a mysterious shame.
I have never been able to understood the roots of this shame, or why is has been so easy for multiculturalists to exploit it. But the fact is that multiculturalism has been a movement to celebrate every culture in this country except the indigenous.
Britishness is truly becoming an empty idea. That is bad for identity, bad for community and bad for moral confidence. It has sapped mutual understanding, bred complex resentments and divisions and nurtured a culture of misguided permissiveness - as the Climbie case so tragically shows. Even prominent multiculturalists are beginning to call themselves post-multiculturalists and to talk of "the ties that bind".
But the damage has been done. And the government still lacks the conviction to offer a seriously considered immigration policy to the electorate. It cannot even, for all its fanfare, bring itself to make aspiring British citizens learn enough English to be able to talk to the staff of a benefits office. Too little, very much too late.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 07, 2003 | Comments (1)
