Pat Buchanan: American Education Suffers Because Of Racial Gap In Cognitive Ability

Pat Buchanan believes we’d be much better educationally if we could get the unmotivated less brainy students out of the classrooms so our stats improve. That seems to mean, according to him, that it’s the whites and Asians who do us the most good.

…East Asians – Chinese, Koreans, Japanese – are turning in the top scores in all…categories, followed by the Europeans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders.

But, looking down the New York Times list of the top 30 nations, one finds not a single Latin American nation, not a single African nation, not a single Muslim nation, not a single South or Southeast Asian nation (save Singapore), not a single nation of the old Soviet Union except Latvia and Estonia.

And in Europe as in Asia, the northern countries (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Iceland, Austria, Germany) outscore the southern (Greece, Italy, Portugal). Slovenia and Croatia, formerly of the Habsburg Empire, outperformed Albania and Serbia, which spent centuries under Turkish rule.

Buchanan cites Robert Weissberg, who writes about how “unprepared black students…owe their diplomas to…deception.Weissberg, a former professor at the University of Illinois promotes the theory that blacks and Hispanics have lower IQ’s than whites and Asians.

Weissberg contends that 80 percent of a school’s success depends on two factors: the cognitive ability of the child and the disposition he brings to class – not on texts, teachers or classroom size.

If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.

These statements, in a vacuum, are true; however, the pretext by Buchanan is that it’s blacks and Hispanics who lack the cognitive ability and disposition to do well.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.